9 Investigates: Troubled CMS employee continued to work in district

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Eyewitness News found a Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools employee banned from district property after allegedly having an inappropriate relationship with a student was still going to schools.
 
Eyewitness News reporter Mark Becker investigated the loophole that let it happen.
 
Now the district is making significant changes to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Her name is Leslie Stevenson-Weathers who was at Lincoln Heights Academy in October even though CMS police said they had told her she was banned from all CMS property.
 
 "It's just a very unique circumstance -- this particular case," said CMS Police Chief Randy Hagler.

Hagler couldn't talk about Stevenson-Weathers case specifically but Channel 9 learned that her trouble with the school system started 10 years ago while she was working at Hopewell High School.
 
Stevenson-Weathers was warned in writing that school officials had gotten information that she was having an inappropriate relationship with a student.
 
Four years ago, she abruptly resigned from CMS when CMS police confronted her with evidence that she had falsified her time sheets and they told her she was banned from all CMS property.
 
But earlier this year she found her way back into the schools.
 
She went to work for A Child's Place, a nonprofit agency that works with homeless children, and she got a CMS ID that would allow her back on campus.
 
She only worked for them for one week then this fall she got a job with another nonprofit The Genesis Project that works with at-risk families and students in the Charlotte area.
 
She was working with the Genesis Project when she was at Lincoln Heights and after Channel 9 called CMS police, they had an officer tell her to leave.
 
She was at the Genesis Project several weeks later but didn't have anything to say about her returning to the nonprofit despite the ban.

The manager also did not comment.
 
CMS police said that Channel 9 found a hole in their security system they hadn't noticed before.

"It wasn't a problem until this issue came up," Hagler said.
 
He said the LobbyGuard system at every school flags sex offenders but it hadn't alerted when someone on that banned list logged in. He said that will change now.

“We're looking at a software program that would allow us to input that data where it will show up in any LobbyGuard system within our school district,” he said.

Stevenson-Weathers still works at The Genesis Project but when Channel 9 called to find out if she's still working with students, they hung up.

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