Hanna Boys Center board member resigns at urging of board chair

Another board member at Hanna Boys Center resigned last week, signaling continued unrest at the center following multiple accusations in the past few years of sexual assault, as well as teacher firings, lawsuits and state-sanctioned probation.

John Quinn, a longtime board member and chair of the youth services committee, submitted his resignation after being given an ultimatum by the chair of the board of trustees.

“Tullus Miller, board chair, has let me know on July 8 that I have only two options: Number one, either I resign or number two – solely because I brought staff concerns to the board in an anonymous letter I received via U.S. mail that was addressed to the board, he will call for a vote to have me removed,” Quinn wrote in his letter to the Hanna Board of Trustees.

Quinn is the second board member to resign in less than two months. On May 29, Tom Angstadt resigned citing a list of disappointments, including that “all teachers were informed that they needed to reapply for their jobs (they were terminated),” adding that “May is one of the worst times of the year to force teachers out into the job market…The timing of this notice was a very poor decision by Hanna’s staff and board.”

Quinn said he spoke out at the semi-annual and a special board meeting on July 2 about concerns he and several staff members have broached in recent months with Hanna CEO Brian Farragher.

“…having heard from Tullus Miller earlier this week, it is apparent to me that there is no support among the members of the Board of Trustees to take action on written staff concerns about the serious issues of increased drug usage, bullying and the climate of fear that continues to permeate the Hanna campus,” Quinn wrote.

Calls by the Index-Tribune to Farragher and Miller were not returned by press time.

Quinn continued: “In my 50-plus years of working with school boards as a teacher, counselor, school administrator, and now superintendent, I find it impossible to sit on a board that sits idly by as its CEO, once hearing of employee concerns, fires the entire teaching staff, makes them come crawling back begging for reinstatement, and then, without any evidence of poor performance, fires three dedicated employees with over 50 years of combined commitment to Hanna’s boys.”

Hanna Boys Center is an eighth-grade through 12th grade school and residential treatment center for teenage boys who are at-risk. They attend Archbishop High School there, and live in cottages supervised by adult employees.

Earlier this year anonymous letters and emails were sent to the Index-Tribune outlining rampant drug use and bullying between students. More than a dozen former and current Hanna staff members spoke on condition of anonymity to the Index-Tribune confirming what the anonymous letters said and charged that Farragher bullied staff. In June, 2018, Tim Norman, former clinical director of Hanna was awarded $1.1 million in a whistleblower lawsuit for wrongful termination. He was fired in 2016 after raising the same concerns Quinn did.

In late May, a fourth man accused former head of Hanna, Father John Crews, of sexually abusing him when he was a student there, and two others came forward with the same accusations in April. The widow of a man who charged that Crews sexually abused her husband when the man was a boy in the 1970s led to Crews’ resignation in 2013.

Two brothers were awarded $6.8 million in June in a settlement with the Santa Rosa Diocese of the Catholic Church, which is associated with Hanna, for the sexual abuse they endured by Kevin Thorpe when he was the clinical director at Hanna.

In 2017 a civil suit was filed accusing a female counselor, Angelica Malinski, of sexually abusing a teenaged student while he lived at Hanna. That lawsuit was settled.

Quinn said that he plans to “remain as a committed community advocate for Hanna boys” but, because of the lack of support, he chose to resign effective immediately.

Contact Anne at anne.ernst@sonomanews.com.