A closer look at Des Moines Public Schools Superintendent Ian Roberts
Dr. Ian Roberts took over as the Des Moines Public Schools superintendent in July 2023.
- Ian Roberts quickly rose through the ranks in education, becoming a principal through an accelerated program in Baltimore.
- As a principal in Baltimore and Washington, D.C., Roberts was seen by some as a transformative leader and by others as ineffective.
- An ex-girlfriend and former colleagues have accused Roberts of fabricating stories about his personal life and professional accomplishments.
A star athlete and a disciplined student, Ian Roberts drew admiration from teammates and classmates growing up. Part 1 of this series traced how he quickly rose through the police force of his native Guyana. But when a relative living in New York promised to sponsor his immigration, he departed for the United States on a visa and climbed the educational leadership ladder that would bring him to the top position of Des Moines Public Schools.
Now he faces deportation and sits in the Polk County Jail, held on charges of illegal gun possession and falsifying his immigration status as Iowa’s largest school district faces scrutiny about how it overlooked his allegedly deceptive claims while hiring him as its superintendent.
Here’s Part 2 of his story.
Ian Roberts always found a way to the fast track.
As a student, teachers named him a prefect, charging him with enforcing discipline among his classmates. As a member of the police force in his native Guyana, he was put in charge of about 100 officers, even though he was in his early 20s. When he was a college runner, teammates named him their captain.
Roberts’ career in the educational field followed that pattern.
After graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Coppin State University in Baltimore and a master’s degree at St. John’s University in New York, Roberts represented Guyana in the 2000 Olympic Games. A year later, he began teaching special education classes at Baltimore City Public Schools.
By 2007, he was training to become a principal through New Leaders, a nonprofit that prepared the next crop of administrators in Baltimore and other major U.S. cities. Program participants like Roberts were able to quickly jump from the classroom to the head of a school, skipping the usual methodical progression to department head, assistant principal and dean of students.
“People were excited about him,” said Laura Weeldreyer, a former deputy chief of staff for the district. “He was a shiny, new, go-getter principal that everybody expected great things from.”
Roberts’ ascent came the same year that the school board hired a new CEO, Andres Alonso. Promising to boost the academic performance in a district where enrollment had been dropping for decades, Alonso emphasized the need for new, driven leaders.
He replaced three quarters of the district’s principals in his first three years on the job, according to the New York Times. Alonso took pride in vetting their replacements, personally interviewing each candidate before agreeing to promote them. He expected the principals to operate as CEOs, increasing their funding and giving them autonomy to build their own budgets without central office approval.
In some ways, Alonso set the mold for the kind of superintendent Roberts would later become. Alonso was a Cuban immigrant and proudly told the story of how his own educational experiences set him up for success. He became a local celebrity and a frequent presence at community events and on TV news. A Baltimore Sun reporter embedded with Alonso for months and published a three-part series about his journey from Cuba and his battles with entrenched administrators and union heads to change the school district.
As Roberts would do later in his career, Alonso urged staff to visit the homes of students ― particularly those who dropped out. On the street, Alonso signed autographs and posed for pictures with Baltimore residents.
“He was very much larger than life,” Weeldreyer said.
In east Baltimore, Friendship Public Charter Schools took over a shuttered middle school for the district. Residents protested the building’s re-opening, telling City Council members that the former school’s students had often yelled at and threatened them.
Two months after Roberts completed his training with New Leaders, the charter network hired him to open the new school, Friendship Academy of Science and Technology, as its first principal in the 2008-09 school year. James Kraft, the City Council member who represented the neighborhood at the time, said he did not get to know Roberts. From afar, he was impressed.
Kraft said Roberts walked students from school to the bus stop to keep the peace with neighbors.
“It seemed he had a good rapport with the kids,” Kraft said.
A neighbor who had criticized the old school wrote Roberts a letter of support a couple of months into the job, according to a 2009 Baltimore Sun article.
“We appreciate the improvements in the school’s appearance and the attitude and demeanor of the students,” she wrote. “This year we are seeing a clean school, and we see beautiful students come in and look so ready to learn.”
Rysheem Mcgirt, a student at Friendship Academy at the time, said Roberts taught him how to tie a tie, bought him a uniform and helped him start a student government association. Roberts became a father figure to several students.
“He made (the school) his family,” Mcgirt said.
A mixed record in Washington, D.C.
In 2010, Roberts moved south to take the top post at Anacostia High School, which Friendship had begun to operate as part of an agreement with the Washington, D.C., government.
At the time, the district was led by another celebrity superintendent, Michelle Rhee. Like Alonso, Rhee courted the press, turned schools over to charter networks and became a national figure for educational reform.
Time and Newsweek editors put Rhee on the covers of their magazines and she starred in the 2010 Critics Choice-winning documentary, “Waiting for Superman.”
Deron Tross, whose children attended Anacostia at the time, said Roberts was a transformative figure. He walked teenagers from home to the school and bought shoes and backpacks for some. He kept snacks and juice in his office for hungry children.
“They looked up to him,” Tross said.
Others were not impressed.
Marvin Tucker, a community advocate and former Anacostia football coach, said the charter school replaced experienced instructors with recruits from Teach for America, a nonprofit that trains new college graduates interested in educational careers. Tucker said the young teachers didn’t know how to control their classrooms.
During Roberts’ second year at Anacostia, the roof caught fire while construction workers remodeled the building. Tucker said he learned about the incident when a friend with a local TV station alerted him. Despite the fire, Tucker said Roberts did not send students home until parents showed up to pick up their children.
Roberts prided himself on cutting down on disciplinary action, insisting that school staff keep even the most disruptive students in the building to break through to them. But he also required boys to wear dress shirts and ties, just like the students at the school he attended, Charlestown Secondary School in Guyana.
Tucker said the policies were contradictory. While Roberts told community members that suspensions dropped, Tucker said students were actually getting turned away at the school’s doors for failing to wear the right clothes.
At a community event about preventing inner-city students from falling into lives of crime, a local advocate confronted Roberts, telling the crowd that her brother and cousin got suspended for “minor causes.” She said the school did not allow the boys to return without a parent visiting first.
“My mom has to go up there about every week,” she said.
Roberts told the crowd he could not discuss specific cases.
Tucker said he met with Roberts to talk about the suspensions and uniforms more, but the principal seemed distant.
“You never really got a real, definitive answer,” Tucker said. “He gave you just enough to keep you at bay.”
Ex-girlfriend: ‘He’s delusional’
A woman who spoke to the Register said she dated Roberts for about six months during his tenure at Anacostia. She said he pulled up next to her in his car while she walked home from brunch. They talked for a couple minutes and the woman agreed to go on a date with him.
She said she looked him up online and read about his success as an Olympic athlete and an educator. He wore a suit every time she saw him. She was impressed.
But she said she became leery after a couple months. She watched him play soccer on Saturdays but she said he never introduced her to friends or family. He began responding to her messages less often.
Then she became pregnant. When she told Roberts, neither one of them wanted to stay in the relationship. But she said Roberts told her he would co-parent with her, and she decided to keep the baby.
Roberts attended doctor’s appointments, said the woman, who requested anonymity to protect the identity of her daughter. But when she went to the hospital for her scheduled C-section, she said Roberts did not show up. She left him messages. He did not respond, she said.
About six months after she gave birth, she received a message from the mother of another one of Roberts’ children. She said she learned that Roberts had at least three other children ― two of them from a marriage in the early 2000s.
At that point, she already suspected Roberts might have children. Before she gave birth, she read a comment from an anonymous reader at the bottom of an article about Roberts. The commenter accused Roberts of ignoring his baby.
She said Roberts denied having any children when she asked him about the post. Looking back, she was perplexed about the lie. She and Roberts already had broken up and she didn’t understand the point of misleading her.
She said he also falsely told her he grew up in New York City and claimed that he was younger than his real age. Register reporting indicates Roberts came to the United States in his early 20s and has used different dates of birth over the years.
“He really believes some of the stuff,” she said. “That’s the only way you can get away with being that crazy. You live in your own world.
“He’s delusional.”
Memoir’s tales at odds with others’ recollections
A couple years after he left Anacostia, Roberts published a book that was part memoir, part education policy manifesto. The book includes several apocryphal stories.
In a section about his teenage years, Roberts wrote, “I had a propensity to engage in frequent pugilist encounters. These encounters manifested themselves in the form of bodily harm being done to those individuals on the other end of my hands and feet.”
In Roberts’ telling, teachers wanted him expelled. But he begged the principal to show him mercy, fearful that his mother would beat him when he got home. The principal obliged, he said, allowing him to remain at the school on the condition that he performed clerical work in the office and prayed with her every morning.
In a 2015 episode of “Talk On DC,” a local cable access show,” Roberts added that he “caused so many injuries” to his classmates.
But of the five Charlestown Secondary School alumni whom the Register interviewed about their former classmate, none remembered him getting into a fight, much less facing expulsion. They pointed out that he was among the school’s top students, both academically and athletically.
“No,” said his girlfriend at the time. “No. No. No. No. If he was a fighter in school, he would not have become a prefect.”
“If anything, he was one of the people who would try to have peace,” said Patrick Baird, his former basketball teammate. “… I don’t remember Ian being a fighter.”
Concerning his time at Anacostia, Roberts wrote in his book that he left the school in part because his father fell and hit his head in New York City, causing “an immediate onset of dementia.” He also wrote that he put a target on his back among D.C. politicians because of his advocacy for the school.
When the city planned to cut 13 teaching positions at Anacostia, Roberts wrote, he mounted a pressure campaign to preserve the jobs. He said he rallied support from the Teach for America CEO, some local radio DJs and Stedman Graham, the longtime boyfriend of Oprah Winfrey. (None of them responded to the Register’s requests for comment.)
In the end, Roberts wrote, famous D.C. City Council member Marion Barry, a former mayor, steered enough public funds to the school to save 11 of the 13 positions. In Roberts’ telling, an unnamed, high-up D.C. official explained that Roberts would eventually lose his job as a result, and that even the teachers whose jobs he saved turned on him. (Barry died in 2014.)
“Any longevity with the district was uncertain because I exercised courageous leadership,” Roberts wrote.
Local leaders told the Register that Roberts’ version of events does not make sense. Tucker, the community advocate, said Anacostia’s funding was based on the number of students enrolled at the school. He doubted a principal could change the budget. (The school also received $62 million for a massive renovation during Roberts’ tenure, according to the Washington Post.)
In fact, Tucker said, Roberts only left because D.C. leaders ended their contract with Friendship, the charter organization that was operating Anacostia. He said local leaders were unhappy with students’ performance.
“He couldn’t save nothing,” Tucker said.
Cathy Reilly, director of the Senior High Alliance of Parents, Principals and Educators, an advocacy group, also doubted Roberts’ version of events. Unlike previous Anacostia principals, she said, Roberts was not active in the community. She described him as a “loner.”
“His perception that he was so outspoken, I didn’t have that experience,” she said.
Roberts also began to impart confusing leadership lessons.
He preached the importance of the “MKVS manifest,” which stands for “mission, key and vision strategies alignment.” He also advised teachers that they needed to rely on mission statements with “vibrant, exciting words” that had “zest” — “relentless, passion, dynamic, committed, outrageous, fun and marvel.”
If teachers argue that their job is just to educate children, Roberts wrote, “this usually gets a response from me that reminds them that gangs and many other entities also exist to educate children.”
Roberts began telling other colorful stories that are difficult to verify. As a child, he wrote in his memoir, he organized a group of boys to steal fruit from wealthy farmers who refused to share their food with the poor. The farmers “were rearing” piranhas in lakes and rivers to protect their food. But the boys dumped meat into the water to distract the fish. One boy swam across the water, secured a boat and then shuttled the rest of the boys to the boys through.
“We spent about ten to twelve hours just sitting there indulging and partaking and enjoying in the juiciest mangos and bananas,” he wrote.
More recently, while Roberts sits in the Polk County Jail, someone has posted articles on his LinkedIn page in his name. In the articles, the author wrote that another inmate cried when Roberts arrived, overwhelmed by the hope the inmate felt from simply seeing the ex-superintendent.
The author also wrote that Roberts was teaching taekwondo to inmates. Asked about this, Polk County Sheriff’s Office spokesperson Lt. Mark Chance said in a statement, “There are no documented incident reports of Mr. Roberts teaching Taekwondo.”
Roberts’ alleged lies have baffled many who have known him for years. That wasn’t the way he was raised, they say. That wasn’t how he used to behave.
They aren’t sure what happened. They aren’t sure they will ever know.
“How did he get himself in this situation?” said Conrad Roberts, his uncle. “I have no answers to that. I guess I will have to wait to see him, to talk to him — if I ever get to see him.”
Tyler Jett is an investigative reporter for the Des Moines Register. Reach him at tjett@registermedia.com, 515-284-8215, or on X at @LetsJett. He also accepts encrypted messages at tjett@proton.me.