Dan Engler had been teaching at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School for 18 years when he walked into the first period health class that would upend his life.

At the start of class and early on in the spring semester of the 2022-23 school year, two 10th grade girls asked Engler if they could sit with their friends. Engler recalled telling them to stay seated according to the seating chart so he wouldn’t “get anybody mixed up,” and then finally relenting.

The girls said they heard something different — that Engler couldn’t tell them apart because they were Black. Engler didn’t know it just then, but B-CC’s response to this claim would end up dividing the school and threatening his career.

It came amid a nationwide reckoning over racial inequality, touched off by the murder of George Floyd. Some schools avoided the issues of race. Others robustly confronted it.

The students in Engler’s class told administrators of the exchange, and they then told Engler he would go on leave the next day, and began an investigation.

Many at B-CC treated Engler — a popular teacher and the recipient of the prestigious University of Chicago’s Outstanding Educator Award, among other honors — as a pariah.

The board that runs B-CC’s winning boys crew team, which Engler coached, fired him. Shaken, Engler went on extended medical leave and separated from B-CC toward the end of the school year. He filed a defamation lawsuit against Montgomery County Public Schools that August.

“If I didn’t fight, I would have had to lie down and accept being defined as a racist,” he said.

This summer, after a dramatic day in court when former B-CC principal Shelton Mooney admitted that he had made up a racist quote and attributed it to Engler in an email sent to about 7,000 B-CC parents, staff and students, Engler won his suit.

A jury awarded him $518,000 in damages.

But a state cap on awards from municipalities limited his gains: After he paid for legal expenses, Engler was still left $120,000 in debt.

Winning was further tempered by his conviction that MCPS could have resolved the misunderstanding in his classroom quickly, he said. His supporters have expressed similar frustration.

Lyric Winik, who was president of B-CC’s Parent Teacher Student Association in 2023, said she believes MCPS treated Engler unfairly and that the school district should have settled with him well before the case went to court.

She said Mooney had made passing remarks to her about the incident shortly after it happened, and that those remarksdid not align with the claims of racism made in the communitywide email. She called that email “shocking.”

MCPS “is a system that is impossible to stand up against,” said Winik, who credits Engler with “a lot of bravery.”

Following Engler’s trial, Winik set up a GoFundMe page to raise $80,000 to help him pay his legal debts. Nearly 300 people contributed to another GoFundMe for him.

“Even when you win,” Winik said, “you lose.”

For others, the picture at B-CC was more complicated. Some say Engler could be provocative. The previous year he used the N-word as he quoted Muhammad Ali explaining his refusal to fight in Vietnam. A school investigation cleared him for it.

“B-CC is a difficult place racially,” said Vickie Adamson, a B-CC assistant principal in 2023.

“They thought their teacher made a racist comment,” she said of the seating chart incident. “It was a situation that needed to be investigated.”

In the aftermath of the trial, The Banner spoke to Engler and others connected to the school to try to reconstruct how a teacher’s remark resulted in such turmoil at B-CC, and how the diverse school had become so racially charged.

Neither MCPS, Mooney or the students who accused Engler of making the racist comment responded to requests for comment.

The email

B-CC is one of the jewels of MCPS. A quick walk from downtown Bethesda, it serves students from mostly affluent neighborhoods in Bethesda, Silver Spring, Kensington and Chevy Chase. Almost all its graduates go to college.

The school also prides itself on its diversity. In Engler’s last year teaching there, 48% of students were White, 21% were Hispanic and 17% were Black.

Of the staff though, almost 73% were White and 11% were Black.

Adamson said the backdrop to the incident in Engler’s classroom was a school where Black students — but also Black staff — often didn’t feel accepted.

“There were times that as a Black person, I didn’t always feel comfortable,” said Adamson, who left B-CC at the end of 2023 to become principal at Kennedy High School and retired from MCPS earlier this year.

She was one of the first administrators to talk with the two 10th grade girls about the incident.

She said the school did what it had to do: notify families of the allegation.

“I’ve reflected on it a lot, and I didn’t think that anything wrong was done,” she said.

After the students spoke to administrators about Engler, events unfolded rapidly.

The next day, according to the complaint filed by Engler’s lawyer, David Wachen, B-CC administrators met with Engler twice, and put him on leave for the following day, a Friday, with an investigation pending. That investigation, according to Engler, still needs to be completed as part of his settlement with MCPS, but to date, it has not concluded.

At 9 a.m. that Friday, Mooney, who was appointed B-CC’s principal in 2020, sent an email to the school community with the subject line “Hate Bias Incident.” In the email, which was vetted by at least nine supervisors at MCPS, according to Wachen, Mooney, a white man, wrote the following:

A “teacher said to several African American students that he was ‘unable to distinguish them from other African American students’ in the classroom.”

The blowback

With Engler on leave the same day the email landed in inboxes, word quickly spread that he was the teacher in the “Hate Bias Incident.” Within hours, B-CC’s student newspaper, The Tattler, reached out to him. The popular D.C. Urban Moms and Dads chat website reported on the email, spawning pages of explosive comments.

According to The Tattler, an attempt at a restorative justice circle with the students in Engler’s class the following week only made the situation worse.

B-CC administrators allowed Engler to return to teaching the Monday after the incident, but he said he felt shaky and anxious in the classroom. He took several sick days and then went on extended medical leave.

Soon after, the B-CC Crew Boosters, the nonprofit board that runs the team, ended Engler’s contract as head coach.

“It hurt a lot to have to step away,” Engler said.

In 16 years, he had built B-CC crew into a national powerhouse, sending athletes to top colleges, including Harvard and Yale. Separated from the team and out of the classroom, Engler said he suffered.

“My identity was destroyed,” he said. “I had been destabilized.”

The trial

Engler, now 51, had a mostly positive reputation at B-CC before the incident in health class.

Adamson described him as “very popular,” but said his blunt manner rubbed some people the wrong way.

A 2019 B-CC graduate who had him for several classes shared similar impressions. She, like other graduates The Banner spoke to, agreed to speak about Engler if her name could be withheld because the topic was still too sensitive. She called him “unorthodox, personal and emphatic” in the classroom.

But “he clearly cared,” she added.

Engler said he had no problem with the students bringing their concerns about anything he said in the classroom to the administration.

“I don’t blame the kids,” he said. “We should be listening to the kids.”

But Mooney and administrators at MCPS botched the follow-up, he said.

“Adults should be circumspect,” Engler said. “Slow down, take a minute, let’s talk things through.”

Mooney, he said, never gave him the opportunity to say: “I didn’t do this.”

He would have the opportunity in court.

Daniel B. Engler v. Shelton L. Mooney Jr., et al., began in Montgomery County Circuit Court on July 14, almost two years after Engler filed suit.

On day three of the eight-day trial, Mooney publicly admitted that he had made up the student quote used in the email, explaining that he had summarized what he believed to be the girls’ general sentiment.

That admission was “career saving,” said Engler.

On July 23, the jury found MCPS had defamed Engler, awarding him more than half a million dollars in damages. Mooney was not found personally liable.

Wachen said Mooney’s admission, inconsistencies in students’ testimony, and the schools’ failure to produce an eyewitness‘s statement played significant roles in the jury’s decision.

After the verdict, Wachen and Engler settled with MCPS for a smaller amount to avoid further motions and appeals — $395,000.

Mooney stepped down from the principal’s position six days after the jury’s verdict. He now serves as assistant principal at James Hubert Blake High School in Cloverly. MCPS is searching for a new principal for B-CC.

In response to the lawsuit, according to Winik, MCPS had administrators train over the summer on how to properly conduct school investigations.

As for Engler, he is still an MCPS teacher, and last fall worked part-time in another MCPS school. But he is still awaiting a permanent assignment in the classroom, he said, and would also like to get back on the water with a crew team.

His ordeal, he said, has been tough on his wife and children, but especially the older of his two teenage sons.

But Engler said he hopes his son understands that he had to stand up for himself, and for other teachers who may find themselves in similar circumstances.

“At the end of the day, you have to do what’s right,” he said.