Former wrestling coach loses teaching certificate after years of complaints

When he touched and pinched female students, he said it was all in fun. When he called out, "Hey, good looking!" to them, he said it was to boost their self-esteem. When he held down a girl with lung disease, covering her mouth and obstructing her breathing, he called it a joke.

After 25 years of these complaints and more, James Randy Deming has lost his teaching certificate. Deming, a former state coach of the year and president of a state coaches association, was featured in "Coaches who prey," a December 2003 Seattle Times series about sexual misconduct by coaches and how those charged with protecting students and athletes allowed it to continue.

Deming, 56, kept teaching and coaching despite repeated complaints of sexual misconduct, in part, because of his success as a wrestling coach in Blaine and elsewhere, the series showed.

Neither Deming nor his lawyer responded to phone messages left Monday by a reporter.

Over the course of his career, Deming took Blaine High School wrestlers to 14 league championships, 10 district championships, seven regional championships and a state title.

Meanwhile, he was criminally charged twice for inappropriately touching students and was warned or reprimanded for his conduct 12 times by school officials before an administrative law judge finally revoked his certificate in May. The judge's findings were released Monday to The Seattle Times under a public-records request.

The 32-page document recounts complaints dating back to 1976, when Deming was a teacher and coach in the Blaine School District, and stretching to 2003, when he taught in the Mount Adams School District inside the Yakama Indian Reservation.

Time and again, complaints against the popular coach were downplayed or ignored. Even when Deming faced consequences for his actions, he continued to inappropriately touch and intimidate female students who crossed his path, the judge noted.

"He did not learn his lesson, no matter how often it was taught to him," Judge Janice Shave wrote.

Shave presided over a lengthy hearing earlier this year, after Deming appealed two prior rulings by the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction suspending his teaching certificate. Dozens of witnesses testified, both for and against Deming.

While the school districts changed, the complaints about Deming remained the same, the judge found. Among them:

In 1976, a 6-year-old girl in Blaine was scared to go to P.E. class after he poked his finger through a hole in the crotch of her pants, touching her underwear. "You've got a hole in your pants, girlie girl," he said, according to Shave's opinion.

In 1983, Deming pinned down and covered the mouth of a 10th-grade student with cystic fibrosis after she made an inappropriate comment to him.

In 1990, he was charged with child molestation and communicating with a minor for immoral purposes after a 10-year-old girl complained that he grabbed or patted her on the buttocks repeatedly, and once walked up behind her and ran his hands down the front of her body. That charge was dismissed after Deming agreed to resign from Blaine.

During the 2002-03 school year, a middle-school girl in the Mount Adams district said she gave up asking questions in Deming's math class because when she did, he would rub her back or put his arms around her.

Around the same time, he was charged again, this time with two counts of fourth-degree assault with sexual motivation after allegedly touching two eighth-grade girls in his math class. He was acquitted of those charges by a jury in 2003.

He also mistreated boys, the judge found. In 2003, Deming grabbed a special-education student by the neck so hard it dropped the boy to his knees in front of his classmates. Deming later called the boy out of class and launched into a 10-minute "tirade," according to the judge's opinion. When Deming relented, the boy went back to class and cried.

And his behavior showed no signs of slowing.

"By the end of [Deming's] teaching career, his middle-school female students were wondering if he was 'hitting on them' or clumsily trying to compliment them," Shave wrote. "They had stopped asking for assistance with classroom subject matter because it led to unwelcome touching. They had come to expect an almost daily show in class of [Deming] yelling ... pinching, tickling and ultimately failing to instruct."

Even today, Deming doesn't deny many of the allegations, the opinion states. He just puts them in a different light — that he was joking or trying to build up students' self-esteem, for example.

"It is not clear how sexual references and innuendos aimed at elementary- and middle-school students would achieve this goal," the judge wrote. But she also wrote that there was no evidence presented that Deming's actions were sexually motivated.

Deming appeared to be "motivated, in part, by the significant position of power he holds over students," she wrote.

"There is no recognition [on Deming's part] that his actions were inappropriate and indefensible, rather than merely a good joke gone bad due to the interference of meddling adults."

Maureen O'Hagan: 206-464-2562 or mohagan@seattletimes.com