Camie Pratt was hired by Chicago Public Schools in early 2019 to lead a new office charged with investigating discrimination complaints. But within her first year, the Title IX chief began abusing her position, according to a CPS Office of Inspector General’s investigative report, obtained by the Tribune through a public records request.
The CPS watchdog’s report casts new light on Pratt’s role in the web of sexual misconduct and retaliation allegations that embroiled Lincoln Park High School in scandal in early 2020. Since CPS accused an assortment of coaches and principals of mishandling an out-of-town trip involving allegations of misconduct among students on the boys basketball team, and a separate allegation of grooming on the girls team, multiple staffers have been reinstated.
An “obvious” if little-known conflict of interest was involved in CPS’ handling of the complaints, according to the OIG. A Lincoln Park parent, Pratt first filed the since-unsubstantiated grooming allegation against her daughter’s basketball coach, also complaining that he cut her playing time and that principals mishandled the case.
From there, Pratt abused her position, according to the oversight agency whose four-year probe found that, while she lied about recusing herself from matters involving the school, Pratt conducted a “secret” investigation of a second coach after her daughter was benched. (Pratt’s claim that he did so in retaliation was later unsubstantiated.)
The agency said Pratt’s secret investigation “tainted” a separate investigation of the boys team, in which the head coach and two principals were fired in January 2020. The OIG’s report completed June 28 reveals that “uninvestigated and unproven” allegations by Pratt informed their termination. There is no apparent legal remedy for the fired principals, who lost their federal defamation lawsuit in December 2022.
The OIG’s report advised CPS to discipline Pratt, “up to and including her termination.” But she voluntarily left the district a week later as one of CPS’ highest-ranking and top-paid staffers, with a $207,000 salary. Pratt was placed on the do-not-hire list in July.
Pratt, a lawyer who worked as the University of Phoenix’s Title IX coordinator before coming to CPS, directed the Tribune’s request for comment to her employment attorney, Laura Feldman.
According to Feldman, Pratt conducted her work with “integrity and compassion” and has filed a “substantive rebuttal,” which will be included in her personnel file.
“Ms. Pratt adamantly disputes the allegations made in the CPS OIG report and is confident that a review by an independent, third-party investigator would demonstrate that she acted according to applicable standards and policies,” Feldman said in an emailed statement Oct. 7.
The OIG’s findings raise questions on how costly Pratt’s five-year tenure may be. Of an additional four lawsuits filed by former Lincoln Park staffers against the Board of Education and CPS officials, two cases were settled in Cook County Circuit Court for a cumulative $1 million in 2023. Former girls and boys head basketball coaches Larry Washington and Pat Gordon are negotiating settlements in federal court.
The inspector general’s office also noted concerns over whether the “flawed” and “very concerning” investigations that Pratt’s Office of Student Protections conducted at the high school “reflects the status quo” of its handling of complaints. OSP opens thousands of cases per year, according to its most recent biannual report to the board.
After a 2018 Tribune investigation uncovered CPS’ mishandling of sexual misconduct complaints, the district transferred allegations involving adult-on-student sexual misconduct to the OIG and created the Office of Student Protections and Title IX to investigate student-on-student complaints and other alleged discrimination, such as on the basis of race or religion.
Hired by former CEO Janice Jackson to help set right the district’s handling of alleged abuse, Pratt and her former deputy “fundamentally undermined OSP’s integrity and fairness and jeopardized public trust in CPS,” the OIG’s report states.
Pratt and former OSP Deputy Chief Debra Spraggins also withheld information from OIG investigators and lied to them, the agency stated in a June 28 summary addressed to CEO Pedro Martinez and then-members of the Board of Education.
Spraggins declined to comment on the investigation or cite a lawyer the Tribune could contact on her behalf. A CPS spokesperson declined to address multiple questions, including why Pratt was not terminated immediately upon receipt of the OIG’s report and whether its findings prompted a broader review of OSP cases in which Pratt was involved.
In an emailed statement, acting Inspector General Amber Nesbitt said CPS’ internal oversight agency has no plans for further action, noting that the OIG only conducts investigations and makes recommendations to CPS based on its findings. Her statement did not address why the investigation required four years to complete.
‘Unique and painful associations’
For former Lincoln Park High School’s girls varsity basketball head coach Larry Washington, being terminated came as a shock. Washington was abruptly fired in late January 2020 as coach and suspended from substitute teaching at the school, where he’d worked for two decades. One of his daughters attended the school.
Weeks later, Washington said he learned that Pratt had accused him of grooming her daughter, a recent addition to the team, and complained to the OIG that she’d been benched as a result. By late February, investigators were already discussing Washington’s reinstatement, given that the case “doesn’t seem sexual at all,” records obtained by the Tribune show. But Washington was barred from returning to Lincoln Park due to Pratt’s ongoing interventions, a federal civil lawsuit he filed the following year alleges.
“I was so naive. … It was so hard to comprehend the gravity of what was going on,” Washington told the Tribune in an interview this January. “Since I didn’t do anything wrong, I didn’t think it would be a big deal. … But the more you see, this powerful person is after you, it’s a very powerless feeling.”
According to the OIG’s report of its four-year investigation of Pratt and other public records: As a rising junior, Pratt’s daughter had joined the team during the summer league, when Washington and players occasionally communicated via text. Pratt’s daughter had periodically texted him to request rides to games.
Months later, when a practice was canceled due to a snowstorm, Washington sent a text to the younger Pratt that he would create an “individual” practice for her — a regimen of drills he prescribed struggling players to do on their own, according to Washington. Pratt’s daughter interpreted the text to mean a one-on-one practice and told her mother that his message made her uncomfortable.
Pratt then contacted the OIG regarding Washington’s text, and soon after alleged that then-Assistant Principal Michelle Brumfield mishandled a conversation with her daughter. The agency began investigating Washington but could not investigate Pratt’s claim regarding Brumfield because she was abruptly fired, along with interim Principal John Thuet.
The OIG formally completed its investigation of Washington in May 2020, determining that his actions were “related to his duties as a basketball coach and were not sexually motivated nor retaliatory,” and recommending he be reinstated and provided “appropriate discipline” regarding CPS policy barring employees from giving students rides in their personal vehicles without written permission or communicating outside district platforms.
From there, “myriad” alleged actions by Pratt crossed the line as her focus shifted to Washington’s replacement, according to the OIG’s June 28 report.
But, life stood still for Washington, who said he continues to be wrongly associated with adult-on-student sexual misconduct, due to CPS messaging to the school community and a resulting flurry of media coverage.
Before a February presentation to the school community — for which, court records show, Pratt helped to create every slide — Washington had been named as the subject of an adult-on-student sexual misconduct allegation. CPS also messaged the school community in June, naming Washington and stating that “serious misconduct” had been substantiated by OSP and the OIG.
“You’ve got a segment of people who read something about you. And no one did anything publicly to say, ‘Hey, he didn’t do that,’” Washington said of the unsubstantiated sexual misconduct allegation. Amid the fallout, he said his daughter was harassed at school, his family was ostracized at church and he was demoted from his primary job as a supervisory mental health counselor, with his then-employer barring him from working with youths.
After previously substituting at Lincoln Park two to three days per week on the side, Washington said the ordeal financially affected his family. “But even more so emotionally. It’s hard for me to go back to the kids at this point,” he said, though it had been “a joy” to help students seek scholarships, go pro or simply gain confidence through the basketball program over the years.
In two 2023 rulings on a labor grievance the Chicago Teachers Union filed on behalf of Washington and other terminated staffers, an independent arbitrator agreed with Washington’s assessment, ordering CPS to issue a “public retraction and/or apology.” Flagging Washington’s experience in particular, the ruling noted that “accusations of a Black man for sexual assault may frequently carry unique and painful associations and impacts as a result of our abject U.S. history.”
Neither a retraction nor an apology has occurred. CPS declined to comment on the apology, which is among the remedies Washington has been seeking in federal court. His civil suit, in which Pratt, Spraggins and the Board of Education are defendants, alleges Pratt was unhappy with her daughter’s playing time while seeking a college basketball scholarship for her and advocated he be barred from Lincoln Park after he was cleared.
Attorneys representing Pratt in the case did not respond to a request for comment. But she spoke on her own behalf, under oath, in a March 2023 deposition filed among documents in the suit. The transcript shows Pratt disagreed with the OIG’s conclusion on Washington, asserting her office conducted superior investigations at the time.
Asked whether she filed a complaint against anyone else at Lincoln Park, Pratt initially said, “No.” Asked again, she apologized. “Oh, sorry. Yes. I did lodge a complaint against Eric Lezcano for retaliation,” Pratt said of the coach who was appointed in Washington’s place.
OSP investigates a second coach in secret
During her deposition, Pratt claimed Lezcano had cut her daughter’s playing time in retaliation for Washington’s removal and said her office initiated the investigation of the new coach because the inspector general at the time, Nicholas Shuler, did not want to take those cases — a claim the OIG debunked in its June 28 report.
According to the OIG: Pratt and Spraggins investigated Lezcano “under cover” of an unrelated investigation of the LPHS boys basketball team and “tainted CPS’ actions” in response to the boys team case. The OSP leaders neither logged their investigation, disclosed it in weekly meetings with the OIG, nor provided Lezcano notice that he was under investigation, until months after he was interviewed by OSP, according to the inspector general’s report.
After Lezcano did receive notice, in a letter signed by Pratt in her official capacity, he filed a complaint of his own, noting that her daughter’s playing time was merely a reflection of her play. Unbeknownst to the new head coach, the CPS Equal Opportunity Compliance Office to whom he submitted his complaint fell under Pratt’s purview.
But when the CPS Law Department contacted the OIG with concerns regarding the OSP investigation of Lezcano, the inspector general’s office launched an investigation of Pratt as well as her allegation against Lezcano, which was unsubstantiated. Expressing a desire to move on, he declined to comment.
CPS doubled down on terminations OIG deems ‘alarming’
Faced with student protests and sit-ins, a Local School Council revolt and a federal lawsuit, CPS doubled for years down on its justification for inexplicably firing two Lincoln Park principals amid the scandal, in students’ “best interests.”
When the school’s governing body sought an outside investigation — having recently hired then-interim Principal John Thuet and being inspired by improvements he and former Assistant Principal Michelle Brumfield had ushered in within months — CPS accused the LSC of “needlessly creating an environment that is perpetuating the life-altering harm done to multiple students.”
After the principals lost their joint lawsuit in December 2022, CPS said it showed the district “spoke truthfully” about the issues at Lincoln Park. Jackson, the former CEO who hired Pratt, said parents had been “acting like fools” in supporting the principals and later testified in the jury trial that she wouldn’t take anything back.
“Very alarming” is how the OIG now describes the circumstances of their terminations. But a jury verdict in favor of CPS, rendered before the OIG completed its prolonged investigation, leaves Thuet and Brumfield with no apparent legal recourse.
Based at least partially on “Pratt’s uninvestigated and unproven allegations” that the principals mishandled her daughter’s complaint, the OIG’s report states that top CPS officials wrongly presented the allegations as “fully substantiated” to the LSC in February 2020.
But CPS refused to tell the principals why they were fired, Thuet and Brumfield told the OIG.
“To be terminated after 24 years of service and to not be given a reason, was really a hard pill to swallow,” Brumfield told the Tribune. “I really had found a home,” she said of Lincoln Park, where students, at a walkout of hundreds, held signs demanding her reinstatement. “To have that stripped away was devastating.” Thuet did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Publicly, the pretense under which they were fired was OSP’s investigation of the boys team, which commenced after Thuet reported a player had recorded and shared a video of consensual sex with another student, the OIG’s report notes. The girl’s mother criticized OSP in a sworn statement submitted in federal court this March. “They clearly had an agenda which was not my daughter’s best interest,” she said. “After they had suspended and fired everyone, nobody followed up with me again. We felt used,” the girl’s mother said.
CPS has said the principals did not protect whistleblowers or handle allegations of sexual misconduct with due seriousness or proper protocol. That’s not only “completely false,” said Brumfield, who now works in a suburban school district. “It really went against my character. … I care about kids and want good things for kids.”
While the OIG’s findings provide some relief, Brumfield said it doesn’t change that she still has the same “do not hire” designation on her record as Pratt.
According to her LinkedIn profile, Pratt moved on to a new senior role in the private sector, for Grand River Solutions, which describes itself as a community of experts with a shared belief that all students and employees deserve equal access to their schools and workplaces.
“When it comes to our careers and our professional reputations, there’s still something that needs to be done,” Brumfield said. “To know that somebody was behind this, and this was as a result of having a conflict or not getting playing time, is just mind-blowing,” Brumfield said of her’s and Thuet’s terminations. “Our careers thrown down the drain … it’s very hurtful.”
