of his minutes. Part of those minutes, Knodel testifies, are spent at his desk when a student comes to discuss his or her troubles. Yes, there is a counseling office, and yes, students are referred to it by the teachers, but sometimes students want to see Aaron Knodel. Sometimes he is the one they think will have the answer.
After enough minutes are broken down to show how little time there is for statutory rape, Hoy says, “Let’s talk about what brings us here in this case.”
“Okay,” says Aaron.
“These allegations. When was the very first time that you had any inkling that somebody had made some allegations against you?”
“It was February fourteenth, Valentine’s Day.”
“Of what year?”
“Two thousand—fourteen months ago. 2014.”
“And how did that come about?”
Aaron describes how class had just ended when the assistant principal walked into his classroom. This was the moment that separated one act of life from another. The assistant principal, Greg, said, Hey, Aaron, can I talk to you for a second? And Aaron said, Sure. Whereupon Greg pulled him into a room adjacent to his classroom. Greg seemed in a fine mood. Aaron didn’t think anything was wrong. Perhaps he was receiving an accolade?
This was at Sheyenne, the new high school in West Fargo, where Aaron had moved to be closer to his home and to teach at the school that his children would attend.
“I saw at a table Mrs.—or Dr.—Fremstad, the principal at the high school, and the assistant superintendent. And I walked in and I saw the assistant superintendent had a very serious look on his face and I said, Wow, is everything okay? You guys look very serious. And my immediate fear was that someone had passed away and that’s why they were contacting me. And they told me to sit down.”
They assured him that nobody was dead. They didn’t tell him what the allegations were, saying only that they existed. He was placed on a six-month administrative leave. At the end of the six-month period, Aaron was vacuuming his house when his phone rang. It was his sister. He saw she had called twice. He guessed why she was calling and instead of calling her back he pulled up the Fargo Forum on his computer and saw that he was charged with these . . . these crimes.
Hoy asks if he tried getting hold of the text messages between himself and Maggie Wilken, and Aaron says that yes, he did. He contacted Sprint but it was unable to help. The messages had simply been sent too long ago.
Next Hoy asks about Maggie. Aaron barely remembers what classes of his she took as a freshman and a junior, but he does remember her in his senior English class. He confirms that they began talking more after Christmas break, when she was grieving over the death of her cousin. Then she told him she’d failed an Algebra II class that she needed to graduate. Then she told him her parents were alcoholics and there was a lot of stress on her, from fighting with them about the drinking, and also that her brother and her father had recently smoked marijuana together. On top of this she had the routine teenage issues, problems with friends and school and the opposite sex—angst.
Next the defendant and his lawyer get into some fairly technical talk about at-risk students. West Fargo and Sheyenne have multiple programs for helping these kids; one is called “Changing the World—Five Students at a Time,” and another is “RTI,” which stands for “Response to Intervention.” There is some math involved. The idea is that eighty percent of students can probably get by on their own but twenty percent will need extra help. The Maggies and so forth. The teachers decided to identify in a class of, say, twenty-five kids, five students who could possibly need this extra help. Then the teachers shared their individual strategies at weekly meetings.
Hoy, seemingly bored by his client’s methodical Teacher of the Yearness, says, “I don’t need to know all the educational theory.”
But Aaron has a few more points about it. He learned the best strategy for dealing with these kids from a math teacher named Duane Broe. Broe called it the “two by ten.” Once you identified your at-risk kids, you tried to talk to them after school every day for ten consecutive days for at least two minutes per day. The goal, Aaron says, was to get the student connected to the teacher and the school.