EVERETT — A third-party investigator found that claims of adults preventing student involvement and fostering a toxic culture on a high school robotics team in Mill Creek were unsubstantiated.
This is the third report completed in the last two years after a family has repeatedly raised concerns that adult mentors build the robots for the Jackson High School robotics team and silence critics. The team, known as “Jack in the Bot,” won the 2025 FIRST Robotics World Championship earlier this year.
The complainants who originally raised the concerns — James, Shelly and Robin Lee — did not participate in the investigation, saying previously that it would “give it a veneer of legitimacy which it does not deserve.”
The most recent 46-page report, completed in mid-October and obtained by The Daily Herald through a public records request, was written by an attorney at a Tacoma-based workplace investigations firm.
Throughout July and August, the Lee family put $489,000 into multiple political action committees in an attempt to unseat three members of the Everett Public Schools board of directors. Since August, the family paid tens of thousands of dollars to send out over 100,000 political mailers, according to campaign finance records.
Two previous reports, conducted by the school district in early 2024, also found no evidence of wrongdoing on the part of the district in regard to the Jackson High School robotics team. Those investigations, which the Lee family also declined to participate in, found insufficient evidence to support claims that the robotics team’s coaches exacerbated Robin Lee’s emotional distress, improperly removed them from the robotics team and fostered a culture that prioritized adult contributions rather than student learning.
A 2024 investigation report said that Robin Lee tried out for the role of the robot’s driver in 2023 and didn’t get that position, impacting their presence and participation on the team. Lee subsequently made statements that were “detrimental to the team,” according to the report, and coaches made the decision to remove them.
In a September email, Robin Lee said the district’s 2024 report was “propaganda to protect district staff from accountability.”
The Lee family said the latest third-party investigation would not be impartial because Everett Public Schools didn’t accept an offer from them to pay for an investigator. A district spokesperson previously said, however, that a family funding a third-party investigation on behalf of the district was without precedent and would have created an appearance of bias.
The investigation was paid for via the Washington Schools Risk Management Pool, a form of financial protection for school districts similar to insurance, which helps cover losses like legal costs and property damage. The management pool contacts an attorney, who then selects an independent investigator. The cost of the investigation is covered by the district’s agreement with the management pool.
In an email to The Herald on Monday, Robin Lee wrote that the district refused to allow the family any input and portrayed their request to pay for the investigator as something that is unreasonable, “though there is no reason it can’t be done,” Lee wrote. They also wrote that the district and school board “will ignore any evidence we put together as long as they can point to an investigation that gives them political cover.”
“The school board writes its own governing rules,” Lee wrote. “If an investigator was chosen that was paid for by us or paid in part by us and chosen jointly to the agreement of all parties, that investigator would find that our claims are accurate, that’s the thing the district is focused on preventing.”
The newly completed report investigated — and found insufficient evidence to support — nine claims the Lee family made. The family alleged that: Adults build the robot instead of students; an adult drove the robot at competitions; funds were used solely to build one competition robot; a former coach prioritized winning over learning; the team had a toxic culture; students must flatter adults to earn more desirable roles on the team; public funds were used to enrich a private company and pay for adult travel; and the superintendent, Ian Saltzman, had allocated more money to the Jackson robotics team than those at Everett and Cascade High Schools.
Four students interviewed as part of the investigation said they felt their learning was prioritized while on the team. They said mentors were focused on providing a learning environment and watched students closely to prevent costly mistakes, but were mostly in place to keep students on track, the report read.
FIRST Robotics, the organization that runs the high school robotics competition, gives broad leeway allowing contributions from mentors when building and coaching. The organization says that adult mentorship is part of the reason its programs are successful as students can learn by working with experienced mentors.
One former mentor interviewed by the investigator did say that adults do much of the work to build the robot and are “chasing their old dreams,” the report read. The mentor said adults frequently steer conversations with students toward the right answer, and argued that mentors on the team should be more hands-off. That mentor said the Lees weren’t wronged or singled out, but that “the mess is in the way the team is run and how FIRST functions,” the report read.
Another mentor interviewed said as of the 2024-25 season, more adults joined the team and there have been less opportunities for student involvement. But that mentor also stated that many other robotics teams have “intense mentor support,” the report read, and that the pressure was not specific to Jackson High School.
Other mentors, however, along with the students interviewed during the investigation, say the process was more collaborative. One mentor said there are some parts of the process that students don’t assist — such as fabricating parts for the robot, which is often done professionally by an outside organization — but beyond that, students are “always involved,” the report read. Former coaches said that students largely led conversations about what choices to make and adults become less involved as students ramp up their skills.
“Students gave detailed examples of the skills they developed and the substantial hours they invested, emphasizing that they were active participants in the design, programming, and assembly processes,” the investigator wrote in the report. “Their statements were consistent in tone and content, showing that learning and student engagement were central to the program’s structure.”
Data from design software used by the robotics team, obtained by The Herald as a supplementary exhibit to the investigative report, also showed that students spent significant amounts of time working on the robot. A document showed that at least eight students spent a total of 1,600 hours doing modeling work on the program, called OnShape, between September 2024 and September 2025. One student reportedly logged over 700 hours of work using the software over the course of the year, the document showed.
OnShape is used to design the physical parts of the robots, district spokesperson Harmony Weinberg wrote in an email.
“It’s ridiculous to say that our robots are majority built by adults,” said Andrea Riseden-Perry, a mentor on the robotics team, in a September interview. “Our kids know what they’re doing.”
Robin Lee said the time logged on the design software amounted to busy work.
“This is a common complaint among the students because everyone hates all the meaningless busy work we are forced to do so that should anyone come along and ask, that the coaches can provide documentation proving that students are building the robot,” Robin Lee wrote Monday.
Other allegations were also unsubstantiated, the report found. The Lee family had claimed that a local robotics company had profited from the team by receiving taxpayer money for building the robot, but in the report, the district’s executive director of finance reviewed expenditures and noted that no district funding had ever been sent to the company. All three robotics teams in the district, at Jackson, Everett and Cascade High Schools, receive the same amount of district funding — $63,000 annually — which pays for coach salaries and registration fees.
Students also said the team does not foster a toxic culture and felt they could speak out if needed, the report read. Students and adults said in 2023, Robin Lee’s statements following not being selected as a driver had impacted the team.
“Every student witness reported a consistent account that [Lee] became upset after not being selected for the driver position and that their subsequent behavior grew negative and disruptive,” the investigator wrote in the report.
In the report, the investigator said communications from the Lee family — including the family offering money to current and former students for information — interfered with the investigation and impacted some witnesses’ willingness to participate, the report read.
Emails shared with The Daily Herald showed that shortly after the mailer campaign began, James Lee offered to pay students $20,000 for information that showed evidence the Jackson High School robot was built by adults, the team is managed for the benefit of adults rather than kids, that students fear speaking out against the way the team is managed, or that a former coach was good friends with the district’s superintendent.
James Lee also wrote that students could get an additional $50,000 if a “desirable result” was achieved, and offered $250,000 to current or former adult mentors if they cooperated with the family.
Records also show current and former students told district officials they were contacted by private investigators hired by the Lees, both over the phone and in person. In one message obtained by The Herald through a public records request, James Lee offered a student a “full ride scholarship for in state college tuition.” The student later told staff at Jackson High School, records show, that they felt the message implied they would have to give a statement about the robotics team to receive it.
Those actions led to the district’s assistant superintendent, Chad Golden, sending a letter to the Lees demanding them to cease and desist contact with staff and students for the purpose of requesting district documents.
“Attempting to bribe students and staff to influence the outcome of an investigation or circumvent legal processes for receiving public documents and information is entirely improper,” Golden wrote.
In an email, Robin Lee said their goal was to gather more evidence in order to make meaningful change.
“The only place this is a disputed point is ironically, here,” Lee wrote. “If you go anywhere else, it is well understood the students at Jackson don’t build the robot. Most robots built for robotics competitions are legitimately built and designed by students, but Jackson isn’t one of them.”
In an Oct. 23 letter to the Lee family, Golden said the investigator “diligently investigated each one of your complaints.”
“It is unprecedented in my experience that a complainant makes a formal complaint and then refuses to participate in the investigation, not only once, but twice,” Golden wrote. “Throughout the investigation, rather than provide relevant evidence or information to support your claims, you relied on hyperbole and speculation, choosing instead to make baseless accusations about the District’s school board members and District staff in the community, while simultaneously refusing to participate in the investigative process.”
Golden also said the Lee family’s offers to pay students and mentors “interfered with the investigation by intimidating potential witnesses,” he wrote.
“These do not appear to be actions by people interested in a thoroughly-invested outcome to their complaints,” Golden wrote.
Robin Lee argued their family was interested in a thorough investigation, evidenced by their offer to pay for an investigator.
“If we didn’t want a thorough investigation, we’d do what the district has done,” Lee wrote. “We’d assign the investigation to someone likely to give us a favorable outcome and give the district no input in choosing the investigator.”
In a document written by a former head coach of the robotics team, attached as a supplementary exhibit to the report, the former coach said the team was severely impacted by both the COVID-19 pandemic and a number of key leaders leaving the team because they graduated.
“With key leaders lost any semblance of organization fell,” the coach wrote.
During the 2021-22 school year, some students felt they were doing too much work, while others felt they were doing too little, the coach wrote. In other years, some said they wanted more involvement in strategic decisions or in the fabrication process.
In response, the coach wrote that he worked with students and mentors to increase required training for students, organize the shop space to give more opportunities for students and gave further training to students to increase participation in strategic decision making.
“Whenever there are allegations or an investigation, regardless of whether they are substantiated or not, there is an opportunity to reflect and refine practices if needed,” Weinberg wrote in an email Monday.
Riseden-Perry, a media mentor on the team, also said the combination of the COVID-19 pandemic and a number of experienced students leaving the team led to increased participation from adult mentors to bring students up to speed. But within a couple of years, she said, students had become much more knowledgeable and were able to mentor their peers.
Now, students on the team are working on getting up to speed for the upcoming season. Riseden-Perry said she wants the focus to be on designing a robot, building a robot, running a robot, and helping give a positive experience to students on “Jack in the Bot.”
“This whole kerfuffle is a serious distraction from that, and from the achievements of the team,” Riseden-Perry said. “I’m not even talking about the world championship, which is amazing, but the fact that our kids — in particular, young women — graduate from this program and go on to college and major in STEM fields and get scholarships and get jobs as alumni and do all of these amazing things. This situation has grown totally out of proportion.”
Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.
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