The student teacher of ousted former San Luis Obispo High School basketball coach Jeff Brandow was himself fired for inappropriately contacting and allegedly “grooming” a female student, records show.
Robert Chomicz was 44 when he worked as a teacher-in-training at the high school during the 2021-22 school year when a former student who was 17 at the time alleges he pursued an inappropriate relationship with her, the woman told The Tribune in a series of interviews.
The now 20-year-old, who graduated in 2022 and has since moved out of the area, also accused San Luis Obispo High School administrators of victim-blaming her as she reported the inappropriate behavior.
The woman said Chomicz was Brandow’s student teacher, but the San Luis Coastal Unified School District declined to confirm this detail.
Brandow was fired for misconduct in August 2023, after he was accused of targeting, grooming and sexually harassing a different female student.
“As a mentor teacher, we set the example and teach new teachers what is acceptable, what is appropriate. Our job is to mentor them and develop them,” Amber Wilkerson, a teacher who is the mother of the student who was allegedly harassed by Brandow, told the Tribune. “It’s frustrating because it’s just one example of the district being aware of a red flag and doing nothing.”
Chomicz was fired from the school and removed from the eligible student teacher list on July 19, 2022, records show. According to the California Department of Education database, Chomicz’s teaching certification was also revoked for misconduct.
Reports received through a Public Records Act request and exclusive interviews with the former student show Chomicz violated several school district policies. Specifically, records show, he was found to be “engaging in inappropriate socialization or fraternization, also referred to as ‘grooming.’”
Mr. Chomicz is no longer affiliated with San Luis Coastal Unified School District in any way.
“The district’s No. 1 priority is student safety. The district is committed to providing a safe, supportive and inclusive environment for all of its students and staff,” San Luis Coastal Superintendent Eric Prater told The Tribune in an email. “Whenever the district learns of allegations of misconduct, those allegations are investigated. When allegations are substantiated, appropriate corrective measures are taken.”
Chomicz did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The Tribune is not naming the student because she is a victim of grooming.
Student teacher invited girl to work in classroom
The former student, who was 17 at the time, told The Tribune that Chomicz first engaged with her while she would wait at a bus stop in November 2021.
At the time, she would often sit and read in an area near where junior football players would gather, hang out and fist-bump with Chomicz, who knew them from class.
One day, Chomicz made a reference to a historical event and all the football boys looked at him with a blank face, she said. So she glanced up from her book and chimed in.
From there, she said, Chomicz began pursuing more conversations with her, and the two would talk at the bus stop about history, friends and family on a regular basis.
“It kind of just progressed to getting flirtier,” she said, “where he’d make comments about my body or my clothes that I would wear that he liked.”
On one occasion, the woman said, Chomicz told her she should wear skirts more because it made her really curvy.
On Feb. 14, 2022, she said, he wished her a happy Valentine’s Day, called her his “little lemon-lime” because she was wearing a citrus-decorated dress, and asked her if she was dating anyone. When she told Chomicz she wasn’t, he replied that he was single too, she said.
Chomicz’s advances were confusing, the former student said. She didn’t know how to feel — she enjoyed their friendship, but also knew something wasn’t quite right.
“It was a little off in my mind, but I also had a little bit of a crush on him because I thought he was younger than he was and I enjoyed talking with him. It was just a nice connection. But I also knew it wouldn’t progress because it shouldn’t progress,” she said.
“I do have trouble thinking that I brought that on myself because I did have those feelings,” she said. “But I never initiated the flirting as much as he did, which was the weird part. He was an adult, and I was 17.”
The woman described the relationship with Chomicz as a deep friendship with a lot of flirting and discussing topics that should not have been discussed, given that she was a student and he was a teacher.
She told The Tribune the two never had physical contact aside from one instance where Chomicz showed her how to properly hold hands.
Eventually, Chomicz invited her to work in Brandow’s classroom while Brandow was out for his prep period and no students were there, the woman said, because the WiFi was stronger in the classroom than the library, where the student usually caught up on school work. She said the two would talk and work together.
She said the conversations were similar to those at the bus stop, but sometimes they got more personal.
Chomicz would tell her that every guy she talked to had a crush on her, she said. The two would talk about family relationships, dating and exes.
On one occasion, the former student said, he played the Frankie Goes to Hollywood song “Relax,” telling the student it was his favorite “racy” ‘80s song. The lyrics of the song are about orgasms.
The woman said that after the song played, Chomicz went on to say he was jealous women could have multiple orgasms, which made her extremely uncomfortable.
“When I was younger, I looked older for my age, so I’d gotten very used to grown men hitting on me. So I kind of just overlooked it,” she told The Tribune. “It wasn’t until really, all my friends started to be affected, or started to get really worried about me … that I was like, oh, my friends normally aren’t this worried about me. Something has to be wrong.”
Rumors lead to meeting with assistant principal
In the beginning of March 2022, after Chomicz followed the student’s personal Instagram account, he commented on her 18th birthday post wishing her a happy birthday.
Then, she said, two weeks later Brandow told Chomicz to block all students on Instagram. Chomicz stopped following the student’s personal account but continued to follow her blog account and like posts.
School policy does not allow teachers to have personal connections to students outside of the classroom, including on social media.
“It definitely raised eyebrows with a lot of the students because that’s when people started to spread rumors about me,” she said.
Stories about Chomicz and the student being in a sexual relationship began to circulate around the school throughout March, even though she said their interactions never became physical.
The rumors ruined her senior year, she said, and she stopped wanting to be at school.
It also made her afraid to ask teachers for help with homework because she “didn’t want to impact anyone else.”
“I just couldn’t stand being there because even if people didn’t say things to me, they’d ask my friends, and it would be like, false caring about, ‘Oh, is she OK? She’s sleeping with a teacher, right?’” the woman said, reiterating that nothing like that ever happened.
Then, on March 31, 2022, she said, San Luis Obispo High School Assistant Principal Desiree Dellinger called the student into her office to ask about Chomicz.
School records show the meeting was called because another employee saw the student and Chomicz speaking to each other and decided to report it.
The student told The Tribune she lied to protect Chomicz during that meeting.
“I just didn’t want to hurt him,” she said.
During that first meeting, she said, Dellinger told her not to tell anyone about the situation. According to school records, an unidentified person told the student to avoid interacting with Chomicz in ways that could be perceived as inappropriate.
Also on March 31, the report said, Chomicz received coaching and counsel from an unidentified person about the importance of maintaining professional relationships with students.
“According to Mr. Chomicz, he was just being friendly and (he and the student) didn’t know each other well,” the report said. “He said it would not be difficult to stop interacting with her moving forward.”
Teacher continues to seek out student after warning
Despite the warning, for about a month after that meeting, the former student said, Chomicz would continue to approach her and say things like “we shouldn’t be talking” or if he saw a nearby adult, he would say “uh-oh, a staff member, can’t be seen talking with you” and laugh as she tried to avoid him.
“It felt like my entire world revolved around what happened and what he would say and what he would do and how people would react,” she said.
That same month, the woman said she felt like she was under surveillance. She said she was constantly being questioned when she went to the bathroom because teachers would think she was going to Chomicz’s classroom.
“From an outsider’s view, it looked like she was the one at fault,” a friend of the student who wanted to remain anonymous said in a statement provided to The Tribune. “The school seemed to have more restrictions on (the student) than they did on that grown male adult.”
Then, in late April 2022 she ran into Chomicz in the Smart and Final parking lot and reminded him they shouldn’t be talking because she didn’t want to hurt his job.
About a week later, he pulled over while she was waiting at a stoplight walking to Smart and Final and told her he’d meet her at the grocery store.
She said Chomicz waited in the alleyway for her and then led her down the corridor to talk. The woman told The Tribune she asked Chomicz why he wanted to talk if it was risking his job and he told her he really liked her and that she was fun to talk to.
The former student said she was confused by his behavior and told him she went to Smart and Final on Wednesdays and Fridays to see what he would do.
That following Wednesday she ran into a friend at Smart and Final and saw Chomicz at the edge of the parking lot. When Chomicz got closer and saw the student was not alone, he turned around and left immediately.
That’s when she told her friend about everything that had been going on, and her friend convinced her to reach out to Dellinger for another meeting.
Student says school administrators victim-blamed her
The student asked to meet with Dellinger a second time, and this time Principal Rollin Dickinson joined the meeting.
During that meeting, which occurred on May 12, 2022, the student said she told the administrators what had actually been happening between her and Chomicz. According to school records, the May 12 meeting is when the investigation into Chomicz began.
The woman said Dickinson told her Chomicz was from Poland so his actions could be mistaken as being “overly-friendly.”
The student’s mother confirmed to The Tribune that this comment occurred, but Prater, the district superintendent, told The Tribune in an email “we have no reason to believe this allegation is true.”
The administrators also asked her to write a statement and sign it and then left her in the room crying.
“The irony was that they had to leave because there was the Women’s March on campus that the students had called, and I’m in there crying about a teacher being weird to me. And they’re like, ‘We have to go now.’”
The former student said she didn’t know what to do, so she printed out a diary entry she had previously written about the situation and signed it. She said it didn’t seem like there was a code of conduct or process in place for students to report inappropriate behavior from teachers.
According to the district’s policies, the school follows Title IX reporting procedures when a complaint is filed with the Title IX coordinator and provides support for the victim throughout the investigation of the complaint.
After the second meeting, she said, the school informed her parents about the situation and a third meeting was scheduled.
The student said she prepared a timeline for the school administrators that outlined the progression of Chomicz’s advances toward her in addition to the diary entry she had already signed.
During all three meetings, the woman said she felt victim-blamed.
For example, she said, when she told the school about Chomicz calling her his “little lemon-lime” for wearing a citrus dress, she was asked whether she still wore the dress.
She actually got rid of it, she told the school.
She said that while she trusted Dellinger more than the other administrators at the school, Dellinger didn’t stop male administrators from victim-blaming.
“When they kept trying to be like, ‘Oh, he’s just Polish’ or ‘Why were you going to the bathroom by his classroom? Weren’t you trying to get his attention? And if he told you he likes short skirts, why do you wear short skirts still?’ and trying to blame me, she didn’t say anything,” the former student said.
Prater told The Tribune in an email that victim-blaming is not tolerated in San Luis Coastal Unified School District and he is unaware of any allegations of it.
Chomicz was fired on July 19, 2022, and the school completed its report three days later. It substantiated all of the student’s claims regarding Chomicz’s advances and friendship toward her.”
The report found Chomicz engaged in “boundary-blurring” behaviors that “undermine trust in the adult-student relationship and lead to appearance of impropriety,” which was in violation of school policy.
According to the report, Chomicz “now fully understands how his role was not to be friends with our students” and “realizes how developing a friendship with a student is problematic and he made a mistake by doing this.”
Student depressed, struggles with being victim-blamed
The former student said she was so traumatized by the experience that she had to move away from San Luis Obispo.
“I just did not want to be around anyone or want to run into people who had talked about me. I was terrified of running into him,” she said. “I felt like I had destroyed our friendship, I had destroyed his life, and I had just been a horrible person.”
She said she didn’t feel like the school had provided her with any resources or emotional support to deal with what had happened to her. She said she left prom early that year because she overheard someone in the bathroom refer to her, saying “she’s dressed up nice for being a teacher slut.”
“I did not want to exist,” she said. “I think that was probably one of the most depressed times I have been in my life.”
The woman said she decided to come forward after seeing that Brandow had been sexually harassing another student around the same time. She said there was an accepted culture on campus where female students would avoid certain male teachers, including Brandow and Chomicz, or wear more conservative clothing around them because they would make comments on female students’ bodies.
She identified two other teachers, but The Tribune isn’t naming them because they have no record of misconduct on campus, according to the documents obtained through The Tribune’s Public Records Act request.
She said she hopes the school can learn to better support students going through sexual harassment on campus and change the culture there.
Now that she’s moved away, she has been able to process the situation more and focus on building her life, but she still struggles.
She has dreams sometimes — not quite nightmares — where she’d be back in the meeting with administrators with them telling her it was something she did to herself. The dreams would jolt her awake in the middle of the night.
Logically, she said, she knows she’s not to blame.
But at the end of her interview with The Tribune, she still asked, “Do you think it’s my fault?”
If you or someone you know are a survivor of sexual assault, you can call the National Sexual Assault Telephone Hotline at 800-656-4673. The hotline offers a range of free services including confidential support from a trained staff member, help finding a local health facility, legal and medical advice and referrals for long-term support.
Survivor support and resources are also available through Lumina Alliance at luminaalliance.org or their Crisis and Information Line at 805-545-8888.
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