A new six-part investigative podcast series called “Not Just a Terrible Story” follows several cases of educator sexual misconduct that took place at Centennial High School in Gresham in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It most closely examines the story of Stacie Love, a student who married her former high school teacher shortly after graduating in the 1990s.
The series also details an investigation into Jeff Stanek, who intermittently coached the girls basketball team at Centennial High School from the ’90s until 2022.
Katy Klein and Syd Gladu are independent journalists based in Seattle. We hear more about their work, the reasons these stories have been seldom brought to light and the institutional failures that perpetuated instances of educator sexual misconduct at the Gresham school.
OPB reached out to Jeff Stanek, and he has not responded to our request for comment.
Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Stacie Love. OPB regrets the error.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. A new six-part investigative podcast series follows several cases of educator sexual misconduct that took place at Centennial High School in Gresham in the late 1990s and early 2000s. It’s called “Not Just a Terrible Story.” It closely follows the experiences of Stacie Love, a student who married a former high school teacher shortly after graduation. It also details an investigation into Jeff Stanek, who coached the girls’ basketball team at Centennial on and off for decades until just about four years ago.
Katy Klein and Sydney Gladu are independent journalists based in Seattle. They co-created this podcast series, and they both join me now. It’s great to have both of you on the show.
Sydney Gladu: Thanks so much for having us.
Katy Klein: Glad to be here, thank you.
Miller: Katy first, as I mentioned, you focused on a number of different stories in this podcast. How did you come upon the story of Jeff Stanek?
Klein: So we met Stacie Love, who is the main character of our podcast “Not Just a Terrible Story,” back in 2024. And when we were starting to talk to her, learn her story a little bit and start investigating, she said, “Oh, there are lots of teachers where there are rumors at my school,” which is Centennial High School. She had a short list of names and things that she had heard and could or could not confirm. And we really started to research and dig in, request documents and comb through archival news coverage and interview other students. And that’s really how we learned of the story of Jeff Stanek.
Miller: Syd, one source came forward to speak on the record about her experience, someone who was on the basketball team coached by Stanek. She goes by an alias in your piece, by the name of Jessica. What did she tell you about how inappropriate behavior by Jeff Stanek started?
Gladu: Yeah, Jessica had been playing basketball all four years of high school. And she said it really started subtly. The grooming behaviors from Stanek, in her words, started in a way that she didn’t even clock at first. It was special attention. It was giving him massages in his hotel room on basketball trips, helping her out financially, and eventually supplying her with alcohol and pursuing a sexual relationship with her.
Miller: I want to play part of your interview with Jessica. This gets to a broader pattern of behavior, including behavior at school.
Jessica [recording]: He was asking other teachers for favors for me. Like if I was missing class or grades or whatever else, he was doing all sorts of stuff behind the scenes. Specifically, an English teacher, he was able to change the grade because Stanek asked him.
I guess I didn’t really stop and think, why is he doing this? What is in it for him? But there wasn’t a bigger question I was asking myself. I wasn’t able to take a step above and be like, hey, why is this happening? Instead, I’m like, OK, he wants to change your grade for me? Great.
You’re 17, 18 years old, you’re really not thinking why somebody’s doing something exactly. And then you start to look back and then you start to put everything together. And if your family doesn’t step in, and other teachers don’t step in, and other students don’t say anything, you’re like, this might not be that bad. I think you kind of tell yourself that.
Miller: Katy, what did lead school investigators to reach out to Jessica?
Klein: School investigators originally reached out to Jessica back in 1998 because a parent made a complaint. This was a parent who had a kid on the basketball team, and she didn’t want to return to Centennial to play basketball. The parent asked her why, and she mentioned Stanek’s alleged inappropriate behavior towards her teammates. So that parent made a complaint to Centennial High School.
The principal at the time, Curt Heath, reached out to Jessica – she had since graduated – and reached out with a question about what happened. And then the school administration also spoke to just two other people at that time. They talked to Stanek, who denied those allegations, and then they spoke with the assistant basketball coach at the time who said he didn’t see anything. And from what we can tell from documentation, that is the extent of their investigation.
Miller: I want to play another clip from this episode. This is episode four from your series, it gets to this. This is Jessica talking about one of the key questions that the school investigators asked her.
Jessica [recording]: Did Stanek have an inappropriate relationship with you? And I answered no. Because I was still being harassed. When I would come home, he would be at my house. I just didn’t want to go through any more of it. I was in college and I just wanted to move on, move forward.
Miller: So that was back in 1998. Then many years passed, and then these allegations only resurfaced in recent years because of a holiday party. Syd, can you tell us about that party?
Gladu: Yeah, we had been hearing about this holiday party for quite some time. Essentially, in late 2021, a group of former players gathered informally at one of their houses. And as the night wore on, they began to share more openly about some of these allegations about Jeff Stanek. So after that holiday party, Stanek was retired from teaching, but he was still coaching one day a week at Centennial. And one of the players there that night reported him to the Centennial district.
Miller: So what happened after that?
Gladu: After that, Stanek was placed on administrative leave pretty immediately, and Centennial began an investigation. They reported this behavior also to TSPC, which is the Teacher Standard and Practice Commission in Oregon.
Miller: Katy, what did the investigator find when she revisited these allegations going back basically two or more decades?
Klein: So in the file, she found two documented incidents of reports from before the 1998 report, and also another parent complaint from 2000. She spoke to 12 former students during that 2022 investigation. Three of those students reported Stanek pursuing a physical relationship with them while they attended Centennial. One former student said Stanek pursued a physical relationship with her the summer after she graduated. Another student saw Jessica’s car parked in Stanek’s driveway that night. And three other students corroborated the alleged abuse of their classmates, saying they either had witnessed inappropriate behavior or had firsthand knowledge of Stanek pursuing a physical relationship with a student. So there was a lot that she uncovered.
Miller: You had a voice actor read Stanek’s response to this most recent investigation. I’m gonna play part of that right now.
Stanek Voice Actor [recording]: My answer is not going to change. I can say it 30 more times or we can move on to a different topic. I am going to tell you that I have not had an inappropriate relationship with anybody.
Miller: I should note that we reached out to Stanek to tell him that we are going to be talking to you about this episode of the podcast and ask if he wanted to provide any more information. He did not respond to that request.
But it seems from your reporting that one of his major issues with this investigation from a couple of years ago was that the investigator Susan Nisbet’s license had lapsed before she conducted the investigation. Can you tell us more about that, Syd?
Gladu: We corresponded with Stanek during the course of our investigation, and he told us that he believed that Susan Nisbet, TSPC were improperly biased against him. Susan Nisbet’s license, which she had held since 2015, had not been issued a renewal when she was conducting the bulk of these interviews. She had a history of prompt license renewal with the Oregon Department of Public Safety Standards and Training. But records show that even though she applied four weeks ahead of expiration, the license was not renewed until nine months later.
Miller: What was the Teacher Standards and Practices Commission’s final ruling, Katy, on Stanek?
Klein: So the language in the final settlement from TCSP says that Stanek relinquished the ability to renew his expired teaching license.
Miller: You talked to Jessica about what this decision means to her. This is part of what she said:
Jessica [recording]: It feels like it’s just been so long coming that it’s hard to feel like a resolution when he’s done this to so many other people. And of course I have regret, I should have told more people, or kept going to somebody until somebody did something. Or maybe when I got that call from Mr. Heath, not have been wrapped up in college, but have said yeah. But I didn’t. And so the resolution has to be as good as it can get.
Miller: Katy, can you describe what’s publicly available about the TSPC’s final order?
Klein: So that final order is a three-page document that talks about him relinquishing his right to renew his expired license. That is available publicly. Some of the information that we found in documents from the investigation report, that’s not widely available publicly, but it is part of the public record. So anyone can go and request that information through the TSPC and get that information.
Miller: But why is there no mention of alleged sexual misconduct?
Klein: That is the million dollar question. We have our speculations, but we don’t have a definitive answer despite really, really digging in here. As part of our investigation, we spoke with Eric Jaroch, who is the interim director of professional practices at TSPC during the time of our investigation. He couldn’t speak to any particular case, but generally speaking, he said every case has their weaknesses. And so the TSPC negotiates with the educator or their legal counsel from the language that is in the document, and if there’s any disciplinary actions that come out of that.
We have the information that we have. We do know that it was a three-year process, from the time that report was made in 2022 to when the final order document was published in late 2025.
Miller: Syd, how does this, what we’re talking about here and the lack of public information about the most important allegations of very serious teacher misconduct not being a part of this record, connect to what’s known as “passing the trash?”
Gladu: So “passing the trash,” for those who don’t know, is when an educator is just allowed to slip away after there’s been a report to a school. So in this case, what we see is without this more robust public record of these allegations, Stanek could really go on to teach in another state. He could go on to coach at a rec league. There’s really nothing stopping him from doing those things.
Miller: Katy, do you have a sense for how common it is for a teacher credibly accused of some kind of serious misconduct to quietly go away from their job and end up in some other job in the same state, or a different state, where they are still in frequent contact with kids?
Klein: I think it happens quite a bit. I don’t have any numbers to point to. We certainly found a couple of incidents of that. Brett Fischer, who is Stacie Love’s ex-husband, went on to work at a private tutoring company where he may or may not have been in really close contact with young adults in a coaching perspective. There was another teacher at Sydney’s high school that found his way to that very same tutoring company. And so I think it happens far too often.
Miller: Syd, do you know what Jeff Stanek is doing now?
Gladu: We’ve heard from multiple former students that he now drives an ice cream truck in Gresham.
Miller: Again, I should say we did reach out to Jeff Stanek for comment and we did not hear back.
Let’s zoom out, I’d love to hear from both of you about this. Syd first, what were you left with at the end of all of your reporting?
Gladu: Yeah, it’s a really harrowing topic to report on because there is so much research on this and we’ve been looking at this for so long, people have been doing reporting on this since the late ‘70s in a really meaningful way. But I think the thing that stuck with me the most is that this is actually a solvable problem. There are things that we can do. There’s an ecosystem of solutions we can put into place that range from laws to district policies. And there has to be a collective will to do it.
Miller: I do want to play one more clip from this episode, from episode four of your new podcast series. This is from Billie-Jo Grant, who is a leading researcher in the field of educator sexual misconduct. This is part of what she told you.
Billie-Jo Grant [recording]: So the Department of Education doesn’t track data on how often teachers or school employees are accused, or investigated for, or terminated for these types of behaviors, which is kind of shocking given that we track data for the number of fire drills we do, or the number of school shootings, or the number of bullying incidents. But we don’t track it for the number of sexual misconduct incidents. The school doesn’t want it in the paper. The parents don’t want it in the paper. The victim doesn’t usually want their information in the paper. And so there’s a lot of incentive not to report it to law enforcement.
Miller: Katy, what were you left with at the end of all of this reporting?
Klein: I think my biggest takeaway was that Jessica’s story is not unique, and neither is Stacy’s, and neither are the other students’ stories that are in the podcast. We see this play out at schools across the country every day. Several people have reached out and said, oh my gosh, Centennial, what a bad apple. And that’s not the case, it’s not a unique place either.
In fact, we have data. There’s a kind of a landmark study called the Shakeshaft Report that came out in 2004, and it says that 1 in 10 students will experience educator sexual misconduct by the time they finish high school. That is a just staggering number when you start to think of it in terms of individual people impacted. And that really matches what we found as we’ve been talking to people, as part of the investigation, just casually and socially over the course of the past two years. People are always like, “Oh, that happened at my school.” Countless people have told us that.
And like Syd said, this is a solvable problem. This is what we would like to stop, and not have that eerie refrain when we tell people about the podcast and about the story.
Miller: Katy and Syd, thanks very much.
Klein: Thank you so much.
Gladu: Thank you so much.
Miller: Katy Klein and Sydney Gladu are independent investigative reporters, co-creators of the new investigative series “Not Just A Terrible Story.”
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