School district leaders in Des Moines drew up a detailed wish list when they set out to hire a new superintendent in 2023. They wanted someone who could increase reading scores, improve the math skills of Black boys, adhere to an affirmative action plan and much more.
Most of all, Des Moines Public Schools needed a galvanizing leader who could meet a moment shaped by the aftermath of Covid and the racial justice movement of 2020.
Ian Roberts’s application seemed almost too perfect.
Dr. Roberts had spent most of his career in urban school systems, building a reputation as a charismatic, hands-on administrator. He wrote books, gave speeches and boasted of degrees from brand-name universities. His life story was also compelling: an immigrant from Guyana who competed in the Olympics and spoke bluntly about his experiences as a Black man in the United States.
“I believe deeply in the promise of public education being the most important opportunity gap closer for youth, particularly with a focus on diverse populations,” Dr. Roberts, who is in his 50s, wrote in his cover letter for the Des Moines job.
Red flags would pop up: The district learned about a past brush with law enforcement and a misstatement on his résumé about where he had earned a doctorate. But Des Moines officials moved ahead to hire him. Two outside companies were involved in vetting Dr. Roberts, who told district officials and a state licensing board that he was a United States citizen.
Nobody seemed to realize that he was lying, and that the man seeking to run Iowa’s largest school district was not allowed to work in this country.
For two years, Dr. Roberts led about 30,000 students and 5,000 employees in Des Moines, earning praise as the district showed signs of academic improvement. Dr. Roberts carried out his work even after an immigration judge in Texas ordered him deported last year, popping into classrooms, asking voters to approve more funds for the district, delivering a Juneteenth speech while wearing one of his signature suits.
Dr. Roberts’s secret life burst into view on Sept. 26, a sunny Friday about a month into the school year, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested him after he was found hiding near a trailer park. They said he had fled from officers in a school district-owned Jeep, where a loaded handgun was later found.
Since then, Dr. Roberts has resigned, protesters have held marches calling for ICE to free him and he has been charged with a federal felony in connection to the gun and other weapons officials say they found at his home in Des Moines. Federal officials said those guns had been possessed illegally because Dr. Roberts did not have legal status in the country.
The episode came during President Trump’s sweeping federal crackdown on illegal immigration and on diversity programs in workplaces and school systems. It served as fodder for the administration’s claims that the nation’s immigration enforcement has been woefully impotent. And the revelation upended the image many Americans have of who illegal immigrants are and what sorts of jobs they hold.
Above all, it raised a fundamental question: How could someone the government says should be removed from the country have risen to lead the public school system of a large American city?
The New York Times reviewed hundreds of pages of employment documents, court records and public statements about Dr. Roberts; exchanged texts with the detained superintendent through a jailhouse messaging service; and interviewed people who knew and worked with him over more than a quarter-century, including a colleague who received an unexpected FaceTime call from Dr. Roberts’s phone as he was being arrested.
Dr. Roberts was a smart and ambitious educator who sought out tough assignments and earned the respect of students and colleagues, the review found. But it also revealed a pattern of lying and embellishment that helped propel Dr. Roberts into positions of authority, and a series of oversight failures that allowed his ruse to flourish.
Reached by text message at an Iowa jail, Dr. Roberts said his detention “came as a surprise for many reasons,” but he declined to discuss details of his case or immigration status. His lawyer, Alfredo Parrish, declined to answer questions about his client’s work status, past arrests or inconsistencies on his résumé. He said Department of Homeland Security officials “seem to be making an effort to demonize Dr. Roberts.”
“It is a disturbing pattern that will fail,” Mr. Parrish said in a text message, adding that “the public will see that Dr. Roberts is a good man whose main interest was inspiring and educating young people.”
Some Des Moines residents said they were not sure how to square their positive impressions of the superintendent with ICE’s descriptions of him, especially against the backdrop of the Trump administration’s broader deportation campaign.
The allegations of deception did not match the impression that people like Krista McCalley, a parent who had joined a protest in the hours after Dr. Roberts’s arrest, had of him. “To grapple with that,” she said a week later, “is really, really difficult.”
‘Incredible Energy and Tremendous Rapport’
When he was in his 20s, Ian Roberts arrived at Coppin State University, a historically Black college in Baltimore with Division I sports teams, only after track coaches at other schools had passed on him.
The new recruit proved to be a hard worker and a natural leader. Within a couple years, he had blossomed into the first male N.C.A.A. all-American in Coppin State history.
“He was the premier guy on the track team,” said Ian Smith, a college teammate who recalled that he and his peers “marveled at his ability to just be focused.”
As his results improved, Dr. Roberts competed in ever-more-prestigious track meets, representing Guyana at a world championships in Spain and a Pan American Games in Canada. In 2000, he ran in the men’s 800 meters at the Summer Olympics in Australia, where he did not advance past the first round.
Details of Dr. Roberts’s childhood and early adulthood are fuzzy. He has said on official documents that he was born in 1970 in Guyana, though he was listed with a 1973 birth date in the Olympics. In Des Moines, his official bio said he had spent “most of his formative years” in New York City. At Coppin State, the track team’s media guide listed Guyana’s capital as his hometown and said he had attended high school there.
ICE said that Dr. Roberts entered the United States on a visitor’s visa in 1994, when he was in his 20s. He traveled in and out of the country, and was arrested in New York in 1996 on drug charges and in 1998 on a charge of unauthorized use of a vehicle, according to ICE. The outcome of the drug case was unclear, and ICE said the vehicle case was dismissed. Records of those arrests were not publicly available.
The arrests did not prevent Dr. Roberts from receiving a student visa in 1999, which granted him legal status in the United States until 2004. After receiving a bachelor’s degree from Coppin State in 1998, he enrolled at St. John’s University in New York, where he competed on the track team and received a master’s degree in education in 2000. The following year, he applied to become a permanent resident of the United States, but was turned down.
He returned to Baltimore, where he worked as a teacher for five years before becoming a principal — a fast rise in a school system facing deep challenges.
Andrés Alonso, a former chief executive of Baltimore City Public Schools, said he interviewed Dr. Roberts for the principal job at a majority Black, low-income middle school in a gentrifying neighborhood. Many in Baltimore thought the school should be shut down, but Dr. Alonso committed to keeping it open and reorganizing it, in partnership with a charter school operator.
Dr. Roberts got the job. He wasn’t in the position for long, but he succeeded, Dr. Alonso said.
“He had incredible energy and tremendous rapport with the kids,” Dr. Alonso said. “Right away the dynamic of the interaction with the community began to change.”
In the following years, Dr. Roberts’s career took off, though his immigration status during that period remains unclear. ICE indicated that Dr. Roberts had legal status in the country from 1999 to 2004 and from 2018 to 2020, but neither the agency nor Dr. Roberts’s lawyer provided details about his status in the intervening years.
For part of that time, he led a struggling high school in the Anacostia neighborhood of Washington, D.C., that began offering more Advanced Placement courses and vocational options while he was principal.
And he spent about three years in the district office of St. Louis Public Schools and worked at a charter school network, developing a reputation as a specialist at turning around underperforming urban public schools, one of the toughest jobs in education.
In 2017, records show, he married an American citizen in Florida.
After the wedding, he twice filed for and received one-year work authorizations. He also submitted three more applications for a green card, according to ICE, all of which were denied for reasons the agency did not specify.
In 2020, the Millcreek Township School District in the suburbs of Erie, Pa., hired him as superintendent. One of his performance reviews would later praise his “devotion and passion for team building and continued learning.”
Behind the scenes, there was tension. Records show that the district settled cases with at least three employees who claimed they were mistreated during Dr. Roberts’s tenure.
When he applied for his job in Pennsylvania, Dr. Roberts told the school system that he was an American citizen, district leaders said.
A few months after he started, his authorization to work in the United States expired.
‘Profoundly Misled’
It was field day at Windsor Elementary School on the west side of Des Moines, and Dr. Roberts was supposed to be there around 9 a.m. The former Olympian was planning to challenge a second grader to a lighthearted race.
But at 8:56 a.m., Dr. Roberts texted the school district’s communications director, Phil Roeder, who was on his way to Windsor, saying that an emergency had come up and that he would not be able to meet him at the school.
Fifty minutes later, Mr. Roeder said he received a FaceTime call from the superintendent’s phone number. When he answered, someone other than Dr. Roberts was holding up the phone and Dr. Roberts could be seen standing with his hands behind his back, flanked on both sides by law enforcement officers.
“It took me five seconds to figure out what I was looking at,” Mr. Roeder said. “Finally, I just said, ‘Dr. Roberts, is everything OK? Can you hear me?’ And then the phone went dead.”
Mr. Roeder said he still does not know who placed the call to him on the superintendent’s phone.
In the days that followed, the school board placed Dr. Roberts, who had a base salary of about $286,000, on paid leave, then unpaid leave, then accepted his resignation. Some said the school board had not done enough to vet his credentials and suggested that its members resign. A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman said Dr. Roberts “should have never been able to work around children.” The Justice Department said it would investigate whether the district’s affirmative action goals and diversity hiring programs had violated federal law.
While Dr. Roberts’s downfall stunned Iowans, his ability to work for years without authorization was hardly anomalous in an immigration system that politicians from both parties regard as deeply dysfunctional.
Lax rules have long allowed, and even incentivized, the employment of millions of people who lack legal status. Employers are required to inspect identity documents that appear to be genuine before putting a new worker on payroll, and many employers have feared that subjecting prospective employees to deeper scrutiny would open them to accusations of discrimination or make it difficult to find workers.
Still, the notion that someone of Dr. Roberts’s stature might be in the country illegally was counter to the image many have of undocumented immigrants. This was not someone living under the radar, toiling in a low-wage job; in fact, he had undergone what had seemed like an elaborate vetting process and was regularly in the public eye.
Jackie Norris, who is the chair of the Des Moines School Board and a Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, said the district had followed the law and relied on an outside firm, JG Consulting, to evaluate Dr. Roberts’s qualifications.
Ms. Norris said Dr. Roberts claimed on an I-9 form that he was an American citizen and that he provided a Social Security card and driver’s license. Some noncitizens have authentic Social Security cards and driver’s licenses, and other records suggest that Dr. Roberts had both.
Ms. Norris said the school district does not vet applicants’ work eligibility in the federal E-Verify system, a program that checks documents against official databases but that Iowa employers are not required to use.
On Friday, the school district filed a lawsuit accusing JG Consulting of failing to properly vet Dr. Roberts. Josh Romero, a lawyer for the consulting firm, defended the company’s work and said in a statement that Dr. Roberts “provided the documents necessary to show that he was eligible for the position.”
But as questions spread about Dr. Roberts, a deeper review of his background revealed that he lied, stretched the truth or made public statements that could not be verified on a range of issues.
When Dr. Roberts applied for the Pennsylvania job, he claimed to have a doctorate from Morgan State University. Though he was enrolled at Morgan State for several years, university officials said he never received that degree. His claim of a Morgan State doctorate was repeated on his initial application in Iowa, though his résumé was amended after the consulting firm discovered the discrepancy.
An article on the Des Moines Public Schools website said Dr. Roberts received a master’s degree from M.I.T., which said it had no record of his enrollment. And Dr. Roberts also said on job applications that he was named “D.C. Principal of the Year” by George Washington University, though the university said it had no record of giving such an award to anyone.
Election records in Maryland showed that someone with Dr. Roberts’s name and other identifiers was registered to vote there as a Democrat. State officials told local news outlets that there was no record of Dr. Roberts actually voting. Only American citizens can vote or register to vote.
Other parts of his biography checked out, including his doctor of education degree from Trident University International. His lawyer provided a photo of his doctorate, which says it was issued in 2021.
Des Moines School Board officials were aware of a citation against Dr. Roberts from Pennsylvania for having a loaded firearm in a vehicle, but said they were unaware of other encounters with law enforcement that ICE has described, including an arrest in 2020 for weapon possession.
That 2020 episode seems to refer to a now-sealed case in New York. Dr. Roberts was at LaGuardia Airport when a gun was discovered during a routine check of his bag, leading to his arrest by Port Authority police officers, according to a law enforcement official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the issue. It was unclear how that case was resolved.
As more information has emerged, some past supporters of Dr. Roberts have turned intensely critical of him. In the Millcreek Township district, where a performance review once praised Dr. Roberts’s “professionalism, integrity and leadership,” school board members released a letter saying they were “incensed” and that they had been “profoundly misled”
In Des Moines on the day of Dr. Roberts’s arrest, Ms. Norris called for “radical empathy,” a nod to the title of one of the superintendent’s books. A week later, she said that Dr. Roberts was “an individual who has been deceiving the public for decades.”
“As the facts have come further along, I think, quite honestly the angrier I get,” she said.
Since his arrest, as Dr. Roberts has been shuttled between Iowa jails, his voice has been mostly absent from news coverage.
But during a stay at one jail, he responded to a series of questions from a Times reporter over a messaging system that inmates can use.
“I am hopeful, prayerful, and optimistic that there will be a path for me to stay here and continue inspiring and having an indelible impact,” he wrote.
He defended his record in Des Moines, noting improvements on test scores.
“As I reflect on my time in Iowa, it is too abbreviated,” Dr. Roberts wrote.
He also described his plans to go to Windsor Elementary on the day of his arrest, mentioning one second grader by name.
“I want him to keep practicing his reading and running,” Dr. Roberts wrote. “We will race when I see him again.”
Reporting was contributed by Hamed Aleaziz, Adam Bednar, Kevin Draper, Ann Hinga Klein, Chelsia Rose Marcius and Hurubie Meko. Research was contributed by Seamus Hughes, Sheelagh McNeill and Kirsten Noyes.
Mitch Smith is a Chicago-based national correspondent for The Times, covering the Midwest and Great Plains.
Ernesto Londoño is a Times reporter based in Minnesota, covering news in the Midwest and drug use and counternarcotics policy.
Dana Goldstein covers education and families for The Times.
The post The Superintendent’s Bio Seemed Too Good to Be True. It Was. appeared first on New York Times.
