OTTAWA HILLS, Ohio — The Ottawa Hills School Board voted Wednesday on a motion to fire the wife of convicted child rapist and former employee Ronald "Donnie" Stevens.
According to Ottawa Hills Local Schools superintendent Adam Fineske, the vote during the 9 a.m. meeting was unanimous. He said the extensive process to terminate a tenured teacher in the state of Ohio meant the board adopted a resolution to terminate her employment due to not being licensed to teach. Kristie Stevens' employment teaching license expired June 30.
Fineske said they began the process of terminating Kristie Stevens' employment because they believed it was the right thing based on available information.
"There's quite an extensive process to terminate a tenured teacher, which is the process the board started today," Fineske said. "They adopted a resolution for an intent to terminate the teacher for the reasons of not being qualified and not being licensed."
Stevens was an operations manager for the school district when he was accused of sexually abusing teenage boys. In 2021 he was sentenced to life in prison after being convicted of more than 30 charges, including multiple counts of rape.
His wife, Kristie Stevens, also worked at Ottawa Hills Schools as a teacher.
According to the resolution that the board will consider Wednesday, district officials reminded Stevens that she needed to earn professional development credits and submit paperwork for those credits to state officials in time for her license to be renewed, but she failed to do so.
At the Wednesday meeting, Stevens said she attempted to meet the deadline, but felt the school did not properly work with her to renew the license.
"I'm still unaware of what the LGPC committee needs to begin the renewal process. I have not received any feedback as to what was missing," Stevens said during the meeting with the Ottawa Hills school board.
Kristie Stevens has been on paid administrative leave from Ottawa Hills since her husband was indicted in 2020.
Though she was never charged in the case, court documents filed in February 2020 allege Donnie Stevens sent his wife a coded letter and kept an index for him to reference in jail.
In the letter, Stevens wrote, "Anything I wrote in your letter, no one else needs to know." The document reportedly goes on to say authorities, "took all of my notes, all of my notes to you, all my coding to you, all my numbers that I had coded..."
The court document further alleges those coded documents included secret ways to reference potential victims, specific counts in the indictment and potential forms of payment used to purchase illegal materials involving a minor.
The document goes on to say, "There are implied references that Defendant's (Ronald Stevens) wife may have culpability and could be arrested."
Donnie Stevens, according to the documents, told his wife she would have to burn the letter he sent.
He also allegedly said, "Any any conversations, unless you tell me otherwise, we will never have about these conversations, I don't care if they put us in a small room and torture us, you know what I mean?" The document goes on to allege that his wife did, in fact, burn the letter.
Donnie Stevens is incarcerated at the Noble Corrections Institution in southeastern Ohio.
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