‘The time for tolerance has ended’

RAYMOND — When Jeff Peterson was hired as principal of Raymond School in 2021, he was coming home to the K-8 school he attended as a child in the small Racine County community where his family has lived for generations.

The 30-year education veteran said at a state hearing this year that he’d taken the job to “finish out my career” in what he called his “dream job.” Peterson’s first year review was full of praise and included a raise. His review also noted teacher complaints to the board had all but stopped.

That changed after the 2022 elections saw the conservative community’s school board taken over by far right-wing figures allied with groups such as Moms for Liberty. Leading the new majority was Gwen Keller, now McCutcheon, who was aligned with Art Binhack, head of the Wisconsin chapter of the right-wing group Convention of States, an organization that pushes states to call a constitutional convention to limit federal power.

Audrey Kostuch had already been on the board since 2021. She was present for Peterson’s hiring and had never publicly said anything negative about him. That changed only after Keller’s election and Dr. Michael Garvey took over as superintendent.

By April 2023, Peterson was put on a professional improvement plan that included a structured timeline but lacked specific metrics by which he would be measured. On September 27, 2023, the board voted 4-1 to issue a preliminary notice of non-renewal, and the next day, Garvey and a few sheriff’s deputies escorted him out of the building. Peterson was told not to speak to anyone.

A final school board hearing on whether to proceed with Peterson’s non-renewal was set for December 2023. In the weeks between, his personnel file began circulating through a Moms for Liberty Facebook page as evidence, campaign organizers claimed, that he’d sexualized and groomed children.

Peterson, who is gay, filed discrimination and retaliation complaints with the Wisconsin Department of Workforce Development after he was put on administrative leave. The department found probable cause in November 2024, and a seven-day administrative hearing was held earlier this year. A ruling isn’t expected until 2027. 

Peterson has also filed a federal lawsuit, currently stayed pending the DWD decision, and recently amended it to add former Village President Kari Morgan and Moms for Liberty’s Joann Koenecke as individual respondents.

Neither of the accusations lodged against Peterson was true. Records entered at the DWD hearing show that a campaign by the board’s new majority built its case against Peterson by taking a single staff activity that was investigated and closed and stretching it into something it never was.

Kostuch, McCutcheon, Morgan, Binhack, and Koenecke did not respond to requests for comment or answer questions about what drove them to spread unverified allegations of child abuse. 

The scavenger hunt as it actually happened

In August 2022, Peterson organized a single-day scavenger hunt for staff during inservice week, a team-building exercise meant to familiarize new hires with the community. Among the 20 tasks, staff were sent to take a photo at the local fireworks store, with a local minister, and in front of Peterson’s childhood home. 

Two of the twenty items offered 25 bonus points for a photo “of a student in their swimming pool” and for “reading a book to a student in their bedroom, or under a tree.” Nothing in the instructions told staff to visit a child’s home uninvited or ask them to change clothes.

Staff who took part posted about the day on social media afterward, calling it “memorable” and “fun.” A district secretary filed a complaint that September citing several concerns, including the scavenger hunt, and an outside attorney the district hired that fall substantiated a narrow version of it: Some staff had photographed students at pools or in bedrooms without the district clearly communicating to parents that the activity was voluntary. 

Peterson received a formal written reprimand in November 2022. It was a real, if clumsily handled, personnel matter, and the district treated it as closed.

A year later, Kostuch told a different story. During a September 2023 visit from the Racine County Sheriff’s Office, prompted by a genuinely threatening letter sent to her home, Kostuch barely discussed the letter itself. 

Instead, she described the scavenger hunt as staff being told to “go to a student’s house that has a swimming pool, ask them to put their swimming suits on and take pictures of them in the swimming pool with their suits on,” then to “go to the student’s house and ask them to put their pajamas on and go into their bedroom and sit on the bed and read them a story.” None of that was in the instructions. 

“So, okay, you’ve got the same expression I do,” Kostuch told the deputy. “What the? I don’t like to say it, but some of the things that he’s done, I look at him and think, are you a child groomer?” 

Under cross-examination at the hearing, she acknowledged she’d seen the actual instructions only once.

Making the file public

Sometime after Kostuch talked with the deputy, Peterson’s personnel file was posted on the Moms for Liberty Facebook page, with no explanation of how it got there.

Obtaining a public school official’s personnel file requires an open records request. The affected individual is notified, and they have the opportunity to object. The original request was submitted in August 2023, and the file was released before the district alerted Peterson in early October. 

He responded on Oct. 9 that he would file a court action to prevent the release of his personnel file. Ultimately, he didn’t file because the file had already been released, and there wasn’t anything further he could do.

Documents presented at Peterson’s DWD hearing show that Morgan, the then-village president, was searching for a way to oust Peterson but had no jurisdiction over the school district. And, for reasons that remain unclear, she didn’t want her name on the request.

Binhack, a Raymond resident who’d run for the school board twice and lost both times, had spent the prior year building exactly the kind of relationship that made this possible. He campaigned alongside Keller, texting her immediately after the April 2023 election that the board had “the majority, 3-2,” and floating that she could become president. 

“I am hoping for that,” she replied. 

He had standing as an ordinary citizen and no obvious tie to the board members who actually wanted the file. Submitting the open records request under his name meant no public record would connect Raymond’s village president acting outside her authority to a campaign against a school employee.

Metadata on the electronic file later confirmed Morgan wrote the request, and Binhack didn’t dispute the arrangement at the DWD hearing earlier this year. 

“She asked me to file the open records request,” he testified, adding that Morgan supplied a list of specific names to include that he didn’t recognize. “I didn’t know many of the names.”

After receiving Peterson’s personnel file, Morgan drafted a cover letter in which she worked to connect her alleged dots, calling Peterson’s conduct “sexualization of children and things that border on child grooming.” 

Specifically, the letter introduces the district’s “issues” by saying they existed prior to Peterson taking the helm of the school but “have become much worse since he has been principal of the school.” Morgan’s letter urges the public to “evaluate the file of Jeff Peterson and decide” that “tolerance is an admirable mindset, but the time for tolerance has ended.” It condemns Peterson supporters as standing “for a dysfunctional school staff environment and (who) support child grooming.” 

Morgan then put the file and cover letter onto a flash drive and sent it around the community. By October 2023, the letter was posted by Koenecke to the Racine County Moms for Liberty Facebook page. Koenecke since August 2023 had been in direct contact with former school board member McCutcheon. Koenecke also passed it to a local television reporter at FOX 6 within days. 

When Garvey was asked by local reporters to authenticate the accompanying letter, he said it “did not originate from my office.”

What families saw

Some parents of Raymond students spoke up and out about Peterson being targeted and what it was doing to the community and to students.

Nicki O’Brien, a former Raymond parent, watched Peterson get walked out that day in late September 2023. 

“Whatever the hell is happening is not okay,” she told Racine County Eye a few weeks later, “and watching it all unfold was disturbing.”

Megan Rios, whose husband is Mexican and served as PTO president while her children were open-enrolled at Raymond, said the atmosphere reached the students themselves. 

“There was a level of bigotry and hatred brought into the walls of the school, and the kids picked up on it, saying racist things like Mexicans are lazy and worthless,” Rios is quoted in the same  Racine County Eye article. 

She said she watched something change in her daughter that year and pulled her out at the end of the 2022-23 school year, once it became clear Peterson himself wouldn’t survive it. 

“Her light is back,” Rios described her daughter, after enrolling her elsewhere.

Morgan, who pulled her own children from Raymond at the end of the 21-22 school year, said it was because of parents like Rios. 

“Anyone who meets Jeff knows he’s gay, and so what?” she told Racine County Eye in December 2023. “His contract non-renewal is about performance. He’s a great teacher but not a great leader because he doesn’t hold teachers accountable.” 

Yet, just a few weeks prior, Morgan was one of the authors of the file that called Peterson a groomer.

Teacher testimony during the DWD hearing directly disputed the campaign’s characterization of a “toxic staff environment.” A story from Racine County Eye notes a district survey found roughly 70% of respondents rated the teaching staff positively. 

Whatever was driving families like Rios’ out of Raymond, hearing testimony suggests it wasn’t the working relationship between Peterson and his staff and his students. School district data shows that prior to the right-wing takeover of the board in 2022, only about 25 students were open-enrolled out of the district each year. By the 2025-2026 school year, that number had grown to roughly 45, Racine County Eye reported.

What it cost Peterson

Peterson says what the last three years have done to him wasn’t something he could simply ignore or put aside. “It impacted every aspect of my life,” he said. “The things that were said about me are completely untrue, shameful, and hurtful.” 

The accusations followed him as he went through the motions during the day and in his relationships with neighbors and former colleagues. They affected his motivation to just get out of bed. What he says hurt most wasn’t the professional fallout but where it happened. 

“These things were said and done in the same community that I loved, that I lived in, that I grew up in,” he said — the same community that shaped why he became an educator in the first place. 

He describes moving through the world now with his guard up, and he admitted it’s hard not to be a little jaded about work he once found meaningful without a second thought. 

Peterson didn’t land another job for more than a year. Some districts, he believes, never called him back for interviews they might otherwise have offered because they were unwilling to take a chance on someone carrying public accusations tied to children. 

What kept him upright, he says, was people who reached out, “literally on a daily basis for the last three years.” Without them, he said, “I wouldn’t have survived.”

No one has explained why

Binhack’s notes from January 2023 show McCutcheon discussing ending Peterson’s contract that June and a longer-term plan to install a different superintendent candidate, months before the file circulated. 

And, at a December 2022 retreat, Garvey told the room outright that no one in Raymond was “teaching woke” and no critical race theory was taught anywhere in Wisconsin. 

Nothing in Peterson’s curriculum ever changed. What was well known, even as he kept his private life separate from his job, was that he is gay.

The campaign against him was a solution in search of a problem that never existed and could cost the Raymond School District, or its insurer, far more than a quiet non-renewal would have. Legal costs have already run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and a ruling against the district by either the state or in a federal court could add substantially more in legal fees and potential damages. 

With Morgan and Koenecke now named directly in Peterson’s federal complaint, both could be held personally liable alongside the district if a court agrees with what the record already shows: that Raymond school board members had a lawful, quiet way to end Peterson’s employment, and chose instead to manufacture a reason to smear his reputation. 

Kostuch, meanwhile, remains on the board, and is up for re-election in April 2027.