A Naperville parent used public comment at Tuesday’s D203 board meeting to challenge state Rep. Janet Yang Rohr’s claim that she never knew a Naperville North teacher had been warned twice for grooming behavior while she sat on the school board.
Thursday, Sept 24
By Brian Timpone
Yang Rohr, a Naperville Democrat, served on the Naperville Community Unit School District 203 board from July 2017 through January 2021. That span covers both of two written warnings the district issued math teacher Timothy Madden, in 2018 and 2020, for conduct toward a female student.
The parent said they asked Yang Rohr directly last month, at a constituent coffee event, whether she knew about Madden’s conduct while on the board. Yang Rohr’s immediate answer was “absolutely not,” the parent said. She later told the group she would look into it.
Yang Rohr subsequently emailed a reporter who had been present, according to the parent. She wrote that a school board is “generally brought in to act on personnel issues where there is a formal notice to remedy or a recommendation to terminate,” and that “neither occurred in 2018 or 2020.”
Any disciplinary action, Yang Rohr wrote, would have happened “between the staff and administration.” The parent told the board that response shows elected members can be kept in the dark about serious student-safety concerns.
The parent also said Yang Rohr described herself as close friends with current board member Christine Gerkey. Yang Rohr had offered, in front of the group, to explain “how this office works with the 203 board and the different schools.”
The parent said that offer should be made publicly rather than “quietly over coffee, through emails and calls between friends.” The parent asked the board — addressing Superintendent Dan Bridges by his first name — why the people elected to oversee the district were not told in 2018 and 2020, and whether the same gap could happen today.
Yang Rohr closed her email to the reporter by saying student safety “has always been a top priority” for her, both on the D203 board and in the Illinois General Assembly, according to the parent’s account. The parent told the board that repeating the promise doesn’t rebuild trust — proving it does.
Neither the district nor Yang Rohr has yet responded publicly to the parent’s account.
The warnings behind the question
The parent’s account was drawn from documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act. The parent said the district investigated Madden, a North faculty member for more than two decades, in 2018 over concerns involving a female student and issued him a written warning about his conduct and communications with students.
The district later determined that Madden had engaged in behavior intended to establish a romantic or sexual relationship with the student, the parent said. Neither Naperville police nor the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services was contacted.
In 2020, the district issued Madden a second written warning. This one explicitly directed him not to engage in behavior that could be construed as grooming.
Again, according to the parent, no report was made to police or DCFS. Madden remained employed.
The parent said a third student came forward in 2023. A subsequent investigation established a pattern involving three students.
The district concluded, in the parent’s account of its own findings, that Madden had “groomed students for sexual abuse.” The parent told the board Madden was dismissed in 2024 — six years after the first warning.
The district’s own investigative summary, obtained separately through FOIA requests by student journalists at the Central Times, found that Madden engaged in “personal, intimate and otherwise inappropriate relationships” with two then-underage sisters. The conduct occurred between February and September 2022.
One sister graduated from North with the Class of 2022. The other is a current North sophomore.
The girls’ parents reported Madden to the district in December 2022. He was suspended with pay Dec. 14 of that year while the district investigated.
The Central Times reported the investigation found Madden slept overnight at the students’ house 20 to 25 times over the summer of 2022, on one occasion sharing a bed with both students. He took them for rides in sports cars and on “midnight McDonald’s runs.”
He also exchanged personal text messages and Snapchats with them, the Central Times reported, including messages signed “❤️Madden.”
A separate FOIA request filed by a Naperville resident in January 2023, while Madden was on leave, sought his hire date and any records on his employment status. The district confirmed Madden had been hired Aug. 26, 1998.
The district withheld records on the investigation itself, citing a FOIA exemption for “preliminary drafts, notes, recommendations, memoranda, or other documents in which opinions are expressed, or policies or actions are formulated.”
The Central Times reported Madden’s dismissal took effect March 7, 2023 — a year earlier than the 2024 date cited in the parent’s remarks to the board.
A pattern beyond one case
The Naperville North allegations described at the Sept. 22 meeting are not the district’s only brush with an employee accused of grooming students. In 2007, a District 203 substitute teacher then known as Brett Zagorac pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor battery charge, after being accused of criminal sexual abuse and battery involving 13 elementary school students in Naperville and Downers Grove.
He had already been fired from substitute teaching in District 203, Hinsdale District 181 and Schaumburg District 54 in 2005, after those districts discovered their background checks did not reach outside Illinois. His arrest record was erroneously expunged in 2009.
He went on to be convicted again in Indiana and Cook County before resurfacing under a new name as an Archdiocese of Chicago substitute teacher. He was fired this past January once his history came to light.
Just up the road, Indian Prairie School District 204 — which includes Neuqua Valley High School — placed English teacher William Schaub on leave in March 2025. The district reported him to Naperville police after an anonymous tip alleged an inappropriate relationship with a student.
Schaub, 56, was charged with two counts of aggravated criminal sexual abuse and one count of grooming a minor, all felonies. Investigators say the conduct began in November 2024.
Neither the Zagorac nor Schaub cases are the subject of the parent’s remarks to the D203 board. But both illustrate the same question raised at Tuesday’s meeting: how much a school community learns, and how quickly, once a district becomes aware a staff member may pose a risk to students.
