Theminutesof the Ludington School Board meeting of April 20, 2026, reflect that three members of the public spoke during the public comment period. Whitney Stevens expressed concerns on the district's transparency issues, an unnamed student expressed glowing support of his teacher, and that teacher, Mike Jaskula, would offer his support toward his students and enigmatically defend himself. What the minutes don't note is that over a dozen students had also showed up in support of the latter two speakers, and that the district's transparency issues were front and center as to why the students and Mr. Jaskula were present.
The students and Jaskula would disappear before the board went into closed session to discuss another disciplinary action against a staff member, but the Jaskula mystery had been offered and the Ludington Torch's curiosity had been piqued-- we would send a FOIA request to the district to find out what the deal was with him. Rarely do you get the kind of testimonial offered by the one student about a teacher at a school board meeting, nor will you easily convince a large group of students to go back to school to attend such a boring public meeting without having a compelling story behind it.
And compelling it is. The request would lead to the discovery of an odd investigation with an even odder conclusion, a face-to-face discussion between us and Mike Jaskula lasting several hours, and a follow up FOIA request whose response verified that a terrible injustice had indeed occurred, an injustice so evident that one could see why students would show up to support the twice-made victim, their teacher, on their own initiative.
The easiest way to understand what happened here is to go back to December 4th, a night where the Ludington Orioles Boy Basketball teams had home games, where some unsportsmanlike conduct appears to have happened between games, but not between kids-- between the freshly retired coach of JV Tennis, Larry Brown, and his assistant coach, Mike Jaskula.
The boy's tennis season had been completed for over a month, but Jaskula would be sitting at the scorer's table that December evening when he was approached by Brown, who allegedly put one hand on Jaskula's shoulder and reached down with his other to touch him in an "intimate location" according to Jaskula in his eventually filed Title IX complaint, he would recount that he was very uncomfortable, offended, and frozen by this incident.
Jaskula would recount the encounter to others shortly after he got over the shock of the incident and recognized early that it may have been caught on security cameras pointed in his direction at the far side of the basketball court. Within a week he had the formal complaint in and a request for that footage, which we were able to obtain from the district too:
What are you looking for in this snippet? At the beginning, you see Larry Brown (in the red square below) move towards the scorer's table where Jaskula is seated (green box).
Within seconds, Brown can be seen to the side of Jaskula, where we see him bow a little and see a hand on Jaskula's shoulder, the other hand moves lower, but we can't clearly see what happens with it.
The footage continues showing him leaving the area near the end, what we do see is that if he had reached for something other than Jaskula's hip area, he wasn't leaving with it in that hand. The video appears to verify that the moment happened, and yet the footage remains inconclusive about whether there was an inappropriate touch in an inappropriate place.
One would think that the complaint would be diligently investigated by the district as Brown was the tennis coach of all the high school girls, had been for some time, and had Jaskula been a young girl who made such a complaint, we would hope that the district would treat both the accuser and accused with the due process they deserved, noting that the footage was corroborative, with what we can see, of the complaint. We will see that the investigator, Title IX Coordinator Mike Hart, fell far short of giving either party a fair process.
Working off the complaint, Hart would interview two people and initially talk with Jaskula (no evidence of this interview was received). The first would be Tyrone Collins, he would summarize it thusly:
Apparently, Collins wasn't an actual witness other than to say he didn't remember anything out of the ordinary happen that night between the two but did suggest that Brown "often touches people in situations like this". His other interview would be a phone call with the accused, Larry Brown
This was the extent of the investigation. We see that Hart never mentions what the video showed to Brown and an easy acceptance of what Brown relates, even though it contradicts Jaskula's claim of impropriety. The alleged behavior definitely falls within the school'santi-harassment bylaw 1422, which defines sexual harassment as unwanted sexual contact, among other things. It also proscribes how an investigation will be conducted in the LASD:
Federal Title IX rulesalso apply when relevant. Hart as the compliance officer did not provide the respondent (Brown) with any of the required relevant documents required, of the opportunity to submit a written response, or allow Brown the ability to have an attorney or other representative present before answering questions: he made an informal phone call. Hart would never interview the complainant, Mike Jaskula, whose interview is mandated by the bylaws and would be relevant after Brown's denial which was basically accepted as dogma by Hart. Would he have done such a shoddy, incomplete investigation if it was someone's son or daughter who had allegedly been molested and was caught on camera with that opportunity?
The only remaining part of this investigation was the letter sent to Jaskula telling him that he was mistaken about being touched on his groin, sent by Greg Pscodna, the LASD athletic director acting as the decisionmaker. After seeing this very incomplete investigation with a serious charge and no interview with the petitioner, any review of other complaints (if any) against Brown, or any mention of a video corroborating Jaskula's account of events in the investigation, Pscodna would mention that video indicating he never reviewed it and that he didn't care where Brown's other hand went, just the one on the shoulder:
Unprofessionally, this notice is not dated, but was finally given to Jaskula almost two months after the investigation was completed. Hart does not relate in his investigation any records that he had also interviewed students who were on Coach Brown's teams. Students who were asked these questions about their tennis coach were perplexed about what was going on; this created a germ of rumors that quickly spread around about what was happening.
Pscodna's concerns were about following up with Brown rather than with the person allegedly victimized by Brown, whose account of a sexual contact would be totally ignored in his decision. Compare this with another investigation that would take place at LASD after this went down, the February 2026 Eisinger case.
Elementary Principal Katie Eisinger was said to have inappropriately contacted a student's arm according to a written statement made by a teacher, who indicated she had saw the incident take place, and later admitted she didn't. Footage of the incident was inconclusive as it was here, a police detective admitted it showed nothing wrong or criminal happened, it helped exonerate Eisinger at the time. While violating the FOIA to suppress the footage to the public, the school's own investigation, and later the school board, determined the contact was enough to end Eisinger's long career as a school administrator. The teacher who admittedly lied on her statement is going to be teaching your kindergarteners this coming fall.
Mike Jaskula won't be teaching at all this fall, and the reason he won't be was because of the shoddiness of the school's investigation and the rumors that it generated around the campus. Had the school district not been in turmoil in December 2025 with the abrupt resignation of the superintendent and the financial administrator amid a scandal, perhaps there would have been a different result and a more precise decision made.
But that's unlikely. During this investigation, the school knew that Larry Brown would be receiving significant recognition from the state for his coaching, earning a spot in the Hall of Fame-- for Michigan High School Tennis Coaches. He would formally accept the award early this year, after his boss had written a decision totally ignoring the claim of sexual contact by his assistant.
Larry Brown would not return to coaching this year, he would quietly retire before the girl's tennis season began this March, reportedly that decision had been made before this incident Neither would Jaskula return in his prior capacity. The district would say nothing about either change leading to the creation of rumors. Students had heard by February that there had been something filed against Brown by Jaskula, and due to the district's commitment to secrecy on all matters, rumors took this truth to some logical conclusions that weren't true.
These rumors would be disruptive and eventually lead to the end of Jaskula's career at LASD after another botched investigation by the district decided that squelching untrue rumors was a violation of school policy, right after finding that a superior coach touching an assistant coach's waist area did not merit any sanction at all, leaving the victim with little recourse other than hearing hurtful characterizations of him due to the school's miscues throughout this episode.
We will look at the rest of the story and show how misguided our school district was in its decision making back in the last school year in an article next week.
Coach Brown Grabs the Mike...
by XLFD
Jul 10
The minutes of the Ludington School Board meeting of April 20, 2026, reflect that three members of the public spoke during the public comment period. Whitney Stevens expressed concerns on the district's transparency issues, an unnamed student expressed glowing support of his teacher, and that teacher, Mike Jaskula, would offer his support toward his students and enigmatically defend himself. What the minutes don't note is that over a dozen students had also showed up in support of the latter two speakers, and that the district's transparency issues were front and center as to why the students and Mr. Jaskula were present.
The students and Jaskula would disappear before the board went into closed session to discuss another disciplinary action against a staff member, but the Jaskula mystery had been offered and the Ludington Torch's curiosity had been piqued-- we would send a FOIA request to the district to find out what the deal was with him. Rarely do you get the kind of testimonial offered by the one student about a teacher at a school board meeting, nor will you easily convince a large group of students to go back to school to attend such a boring public meeting without having a compelling story behind it.
And compelling it is. The request would lead to the discovery of an odd investigation with an even odder conclusion, a face-to-face discussion between us and Mike Jaskula lasting several hours, and a follow up FOIA request whose response verified that a terrible injustice had indeed occurred, an injustice so evident that one could see why students would show up to support the twice-made victim, their teacher, on their own initiative.
The easiest way to understand what happened here is to go back to December 4th, a night where the Ludington Orioles Boy Basketball teams had home games, where some unsportsmanlike conduct appears to have happened between games, but not between kids-- between the freshly retired coach of JV Tennis, Larry Brown, and his assistant coach, Mike Jaskula.
The boy's tennis season had been completed for over a month, but Jaskula would be sitting at the scorer's table that December evening when he was approached by Brown, who allegedly put one hand on Jaskula's shoulder and reached down with his other to touch him in an "intimate location" according to Jaskula in his eventually filed Title IX complaint, he would recount that he was very uncomfortable, offended, and frozen by this incident.
Jaskula would recount the encounter to others shortly after he got over the shock of the incident and recognized early that it may have been caught on security cameras pointed in his direction at the far side of the basketball court. Within a week he had the formal complaint in and a request for that footage, which we were able to obtain from the district too:
What are you looking for in this snippet? At the beginning, you see Larry Brown (in the red square below) move towards the scorer's table where Jaskula is seated (green box).
Within seconds, Brown can be seen to the side of Jaskula, where we see him bow a little and see a hand on Jaskula's shoulder, the other hand moves lower, but we can't clearly see what happens with it.
The footage continues showing him leaving the area near the end, what we do see is that if he had reached for something other than Jaskula's hip area, he wasn't leaving with it in that hand. The video appears to verify that the moment happened, and yet the footage remains inconclusive about whether there was an inappropriate touch in an inappropriate place.
One would think that the complaint would be diligently investigated by the district as Brown was the tennis coach of all the high school girls, had been for some time, and had Jaskula been a young girl who made such a complaint, we would hope that the district would treat both the accuser and accused with the due process they deserved, noting that the footage was corroborative, with what we can see, of the complaint. We will see that the investigator, Title IX Coordinator Mike Hart, fell far short of giving either party a fair process.
Working off the complaint, Hart would interview two people and initially talk with Jaskula (no evidence of this interview was received). The first would be Tyrone Collins, he would summarize it thusly:
Apparently, Collins wasn't an actual witness other than to say he didn't remember anything out of the ordinary happen that night between the two but did suggest that Brown "often touches people in situations like this". His other interview would be a phone call with the accused, Larry Brown
This was the extent of the investigation. We see that Hart never mentions what the video showed to Brown and an easy acceptance of what Brown relates, even though it contradicts Jaskula's claim of impropriety. The alleged behavior definitely falls within the school's anti-harassment bylaw 1422, which defines sexual harassment as unwanted sexual contact, among other things. It also proscribes how an investigation will be conducted in the LASD:
Federal Title IX rules also apply when relevant. Hart as the compliance officer did not provide the respondent (Brown) with any of the required relevant documents required, of the opportunity to submit a written response, or allow Brown the ability to have an attorney or other representative present before answering questions: he made an informal phone call. Hart would never interview the complainant, Mike Jaskula, whose interview is mandated by the bylaws and would be relevant after Brown's denial which was basically accepted as dogma by Hart. Would he have done such a shoddy, incomplete investigation if it was someone's son or daughter who had allegedly been molested and was caught on camera with that opportunity?
The only remaining part of this investigation was the letter sent to Jaskula telling him that he was mistaken about being touched on his groin, sent by Greg Pscodna, the LASD athletic director acting as the decisionmaker. After seeing this very incomplete investigation with a serious charge and no interview with the petitioner, any review of other complaints (if any) against Brown, or any mention of a video corroborating Jaskula's account of events in the investigation, Pscodna would mention that video indicating he never reviewed it and that he didn't care where Brown's other hand went, just the one on the shoulder:
Unprofessionally, this notice is not dated, but was finally given to Jaskula almost two months after the investigation was completed. Hart does not relate in his investigation any records that he had also interviewed students who were on Coach Brown's teams. Students who were asked these questions about their tennis coach were perplexed about what was going on; this created a germ of rumors that quickly spread around about what was happening.
Pscodna's concerns were about following up with Brown rather than with the person allegedly victimized by Brown, whose account of a sexual contact would be totally ignored in his decision. Compare this with another investigation that would take place at LASD after this went down, the February 2026 Eisinger case.
Elementary Principal Katie Eisinger was said to have inappropriately contacted a student's arm according to a written statement made by a teacher, who indicated she had saw the incident take place, and later admitted she didn't. Footage of the incident was inconclusive as it was here, a police detective admitted it showed nothing wrong or criminal happened, it helped exonerate Eisinger at the time. While violating the FOIA to suppress the footage to the public, the school's own investigation, and later the school board, determined the contact was enough to end Eisinger's long career as a school administrator. The teacher who admittedly lied on her statement is going to be teaching your kindergarteners this coming fall.
Mike Jaskula won't be teaching at all this fall, and the reason he won't be was because of the shoddiness of the school's investigation and the rumors that it generated around the campus. Had the school district not been in turmoil in December 2025 with the abrupt resignation of the superintendent and the financial administrator amid a scandal, perhaps there would have been a different result and a more precise decision made.
But that's unlikely. During this investigation, the school knew that Larry Brown would be receiving significant recognition from the state for his coaching, earning a spot in the Hall of Fame-- for Michigan High School Tennis Coaches. He would formally accept the award early this year, after his boss had written a decision totally ignoring the claim of sexual contact by his assistant.
Larry Brown would not return to coaching this year, he would quietly retire before the girl's tennis season began this March, reportedly that decision had been made before this incident Neither would Jaskula return in his prior capacity. The district would say nothing about either change leading to the creation of rumors. Students had heard by February that there had been something filed against Brown by Jaskula, and due to the district's commitment to secrecy on all matters, rumors took this truth to some logical conclusions that weren't true.
These rumors would be disruptive and eventually lead to the end of Jaskula's career at LASD after another botched investigation by the district decided that squelching untrue rumors was a violation of school policy, right after finding that a superior coach touching an assistant coach's waist area did not merit any sanction at all, leaving the victim with little recourse other than hearing hurtful characterizations of him due to the school's miscues throughout this episode.
We will look at the rest of the story and show how misguided our school district was in its decision making back in the last school year in an article next week.