Henderson assistant principal arrested in Texas for alleged sex crimes
The capture of a former Henderson middle school assistant principal in Texas on Friday marked the fifth arrest of Clark County School District employees this week.
Howard Hughes, 61, is facing three counts of contact/attempting to contact a minor for sex by a person of authority, school district police announced Friday.
A fugitive task force took Hughes into custody on a warrant issued Wednesday, police said.
Hughes was identified as a suspect in an investigation launched at Webb Middle School earlier this month, police said.
“At the beginning of the investigation, Hughes was placed on leave per the negotiated agreement with the employee’s bargaining unit,” said police, adding that he had since resigned and is now barred from stepping onto campus.
Hughes was hired by the school district in January 2022.
Additional information on the allegations was not immediately available Friday.
The school district did not respond to an after-hours message seeking comment on the series of arrests.
North Las Vegas police on Monday arrested a Canyon Springs High School janitor accused of sexually assaulting a student on campus.
Devyn Hudson, 27, was jailed on counts of sexual assault of a minor under the age of 16 and attempted sex assault and lewdness with a minor.
The student said that she had befriended Hudson and that they met in a classroom in late February where he assaulted her as she was trying to leave, police said. She reported the alleged assault to a counselor.
Hudson was hired by the district in 2015, officials said.
The same day, a Western High School student success advocate was arrested on two counts of a school employee engaged in sexual conduct with a pupil and one count of contacting a minor for sex, police said.
Police said Joshua Herrera, 28, worked as a office specialist for another school they did not name where he engaged in sexual contact with a minor.
While at Western earlier this year, he exchanged hundreds of text messages with the victim in an attempt to lure the student, police said.
On Wednesday, school district police arrested a computer technician at Woolley Elementary School on allegations of electronic surveillance at the school, monitoring private conversations, attempting to destroy evidence and damage to public property.
The school district said the investigation into Haroon Zakai, 44, so far “indicates the matter only involved adults.”
And on Thursday, Mesquite police arrested a Hughes Middle School counselor on a decade-old case out of St. George, Utah, police said.
David Scott Curtis, 54, was booked on suspicion of aggravated sexual abuse of a minor, police said.
News of the arrests has been spread on the CCSD Parents Facebook group which is followed by more than 17,000 social media users.
“When you hear about several of them (arrests) in one week, it makes you very concerned as to what else is happening that maybe you don’t know about,” said one of the group’s administrators, Rebecca Garcia. “There always seems to be limited communication that comes out from the schools to be able to proactively alert” parents.
Garcia, a former Nevada PTA president, has three children enrolled in the school district.
The Facebook group was created in 2018 to address funding challenges but has since morphed into a general topic hub for issues within the district, Garcia said.
A past arrest at one of her kids’ schools left Garcia frustrated as a parent, she said, adding that for families “it’s always hard to know what the situation is, how much was your child at risk, and how you address it with your kids.”
Garcia said this wasn’t the first time multiple school district employees were arrested in a single week, and she noted that such arrests occur elsewhere.
It’s just that the Clark County School District is so massive that it employs more than 40,000 people, she explained.
“Sometimes we assume it’s a CCSD issue rather than part of the challenge that the district is so large it’s likelier to happen,” she said.
Still, the misconduct is bound to continue happening due to the district’s staff shortage crisis, Garcia said.
“The more staffing shortages exist,” she said, “that means you’re not necessarily able to pick the best, you’re picking who’s available.”
A 2017 Las Vegas Review-Journal investigation published after 31 Clark County School District employees were arrested on allegations of sexual and inappropriate behavior with students within a three-year period found that an untold number of district employees had their personnel files wiped of sexual misconduct allegations.
Experts and lawyers who spoke to the Review-Journal said the issue was three-fold: the district’s contract with the teacher’s union, loopholes in background checks and insufficient training.
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Contact Ricardo Torres-Cortez at rtorres@reviewjournal.com.
