Before Ian Roberts’ arrest, before the national news firestorm, before the guilty plea in a federal courthouse, Joseph Hill wanted the Des Moines School Board to fire its superintendent.
Hill, 66, a used-car dealer and trucking company owner in Kansas City, Missouri, said his problem with Roberts began when Hill, since divorced, drove to his estranged wife’s house in July 2023. He brought a dozen red roses, some soda and some juice.
In her garage, Hill said he spotted a car he didn’t recognize.
Hill rummaged through a briefcase inside the vehicle and found papers with Roberts’ name on them, he said. He had long known of Roberts, who consulted for his wife’s company, Lively Paradox. Throughout the course of his on-again, off-again marriage, Hill said, he overheard Roberts on the phone with his wife, Nicole Price. He said Price had insisted that her relationship with Roberts was strictly professional.
Now, as he bounded up the stairs, he found Price walking out of her bedroom. He said he pushed past her, barged through the door and saw Roberts in bed, watching soccer on TV.
A fight followed. Hill called 911. Price called 911.
“ESTRANGED HUSBAND IS INSIDE,” a Kansas City Police dispatcher wrote in a message to responding officers.
“HER BOYFRIEND IS ARMED WITH WEAPON.”
“HUSBAND IS GOING TO GET SHOT.”
Roberts did not shoot Hill. And, after weighing the husband’s and wife’s narratives, police arrested Hill on an assault charge. A Kansas City, Missouri, police spokesperson declined to comment on why officers did not charge the person with the gun. A prosecutor later dropped the charge against Hill.
Three years later, Hill said in an interview that he believes the Des Moines School Board should have fired Roberts after the incident. Following the dispute, Hill applied for a restraining order against Roberts, accusing the superintendent of putting a gun to his head and sleeping with Price.
Roberts’ relationship with Price — and what Des Moines Public School officials knew about that relationship at the time ― came under fresh scrutiny in April. After district officials asked for a review of Roberts’ spending while in office, Iowa State Auditor Rob Sand scrutinized the superintendent’s work for Price.
According to a report the auditor’s office released April 28, the Des Moines district paid Lively Paradox about $6,700 for two trainings in 2023 even after some district officials learned of Roberts’ connection with the company.
Citing a police report, state auditors wrote that Roberts’ relationship with Price seemed to be “amorous.”
Hill said he never contacted Des Moines Public Schools officials about the domestic dispute at his wife’s house. But he believes district officials knew Roberts threatened him in the summer of 2023, the superintendent’s first weeks on the job.
When Hill applied for a restraining order, according to Polk County sheriff’s records, a deputy served Roberts in his Des Moines Public Schools office. Hill also shared with the Des Moines Register a screenshot of a text message he said he received from Price, allegedly sent the day after deputies served Roberts in his office, saying the district declined a partnership with Price because the restraining order mentioned her.
“They knew exactly what was going on,” Hill said.
District spokesperson Phil Roeder denied that Des Moines Public Schools leaders knew about the restraining order until after federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested Roberts on Sept. 26, 2025. Roberts, a Guyana native, had not been authorized to work in the United States since 2020, more than 2 years before the district hired him.
Des Moines Public Schools leaders have said they did not know Roberts lacked work authorization or that he had received a deportation order more than a year before his Des Moines arrest. Roberts pleaded guilty to federal charges of making a false statement for employment and illegal firearms possession. He awaits a May 29 sentencing hearing.
In addition to screenshots of text messages that Hill said Price sent him, he shared with the Register recordings he made of his counseling sessions with Price two-and-a-half years ago.
Price told the Register she did not recall sending Hill text messages about Des Moines Public Schools. Asked about the recordings, she said Hill may have manufactured fake audio of her, an allegation Hill denied. Price confirmed some information from the recordings before hanging up on a Register reporter.
“You all should really find more news to focus on in Des Moines,” said Price, who filed for divorce a week after Hill’s arrest in 2023. “Clearly there’s not much going on there.”
Roberts was in yearslong business relationship with Price
In one recording of a counseling session that Hill provided, Price outlined her initial relationship with Roberts.
She said she met him in 2014 at the Charlotte Douglas International Airport in North Carolina, the same year his tenure as a District of Columbia Public Schools principal ended. They exchanged numbers.
Price, a leadership consultant, said she soon called him to discuss a client who needed “emotional intelligence stuff.” According to Roberts’ resume, he became an executive leadership coach at Lively Paradox in June 2014.
Soon after they met, Price said, Roberts provided her “spiritual counsel,” sharing scriptures and uplifting songs. She said the two began an emotional affair.
“The texting was happening every day,” she said. “… Things are elevating, at least on my end. I’m talking to this man way more than I should.”
She added: “It’s obvious he thinks I’m smart. He respects my work. It does not matter what I’ve got going on. He celebrates my work. I think, emotionally, just being kind and considerate — it’s something that absolutely caught my attention.”
Price said their relationship evolved, though her timeline changes in the recordings Hill provided.
In one recording Hill shared, Price told him, “I did not have sex with Dr. Roberts until 2016.” In another recording, she said the two “had a physical relationship” for the first time in 2022.
In recording, Price said her and Roberts’ ‘money is kind of tied up together’
Price also said Roberts was an independent contractor for Lively Paradox. The two published books together and they shared revenue on projects.
“Our money is kind of tied up together,” she said. “If a client is interested in something that’s his work and my work, I would basically get 60% and he’d get 40%.”
She began to work for school districts where Roberts was an administrator. When Roberts was a network superintendent at St. Louis Public Schools, she said, he hired Lively Paradox for three professional development trainings.
In an Instagram video prior to the superintendent’s arrest, Price gave a similar account about working with St. Louis Public Schools when Roberts was an administrator, according to the Associated Press.
When Roberts became chief schools officer at Aspire Public Schools, a charter management organization in California and Tennessee, Price said, she signed a contract that would pay “a nice 10 grand every month.” The organization paid Lively Paradox at least $8,300 in 2019, according to the AP.
But, in the recording, Price said Aspire canceled the contract when Hill sent Roberts an email. Hill told the Register that he wrote Roberts a message, threatening to tell his bosses about his romantic relationship with Price.
In the recording, Price said Roberts then reported the professional relationship to an Aspire official.
“He didn’t want it to be no problem,” Price said. “And to make sure there was no appearance of impropriety, they canceled the rest of my contract.”
After the Millcreek Public School Board hired Roberts as superintendent in Erie, Pennsylvania, in 2020, Price said, local officials there “didn’t think it would be ethical for me to do any work for them.”
But later, on the same recording, she said, “I made 20 grand off of Millcreek.” According to invoices provided by the Millcreek Township School District in response to an open records request, Price proposed charging the district $20,000 for a pair of leadership training programs in the summer of 2021. Roberts suggested the district work with her.
“Dr. Price and I have done a lot of work together as intellectual thought-partners, and I have not encountered anyone better at leading the DEI/Culturally Responsive work, as well as leading high performance leadership workshops,” Roberts wrote to a district staffer who was helping plan summer leadership programs.
However, according to records provided by the district, Millcreek officials only paid Price about $1,700 to conduct Myers Briggs assessments and to travel to Erie.
Price confirmed to the Register that she did work for the district and that Roberts consulted for her company.
Husband alleges Roberts pressed a gun to his head
When Hill found Roberts in Price’s bed on July 26, 2023, he told the Register, he tried to take a cellphone picture of the superintendent. But he said Roberts knocked the phone out of his hand. Hill said he punched Roberts in the jaw.
He said he bent down to pick up his phone and alleges Roberts pressed a handgun against his head. He said Roberts ordered him to walk out of the room, aiming the weapon at him.
Hill called 911 and, according to a dispatch log, reported an armed, naked man in his wife’s room. In her own 911 call, according to the dispatch log, Price said she felt scared, that her boyfriend was armed and that her husband was going to get shot.
When officers arrived, according to the incident report, Price said the gun was unloaded. She said Hill pushed her down. Officers arrested Hill on a domestic violence charge, which a prosecutor dropped four months later.
The Kansas City police report of the incident does not name Roberts, and an officer wrote that the man in Price’s bedroom was “non-cooperating” and “did not wish to be identified.”
Roberts is married to another woman and had lost his legal work authorization 2 1/2 years earlier, in December 2020. A Kansas City, Missouri, police spokesperson did not respond to a question from the Register about whether officers should have documented all parties’ names in the domestic violence investigation.
Two days after Hill’s arrest, he applied for a restraining order against Roberts in Jackson County, Missouri, identifying the superintendent as the armed man.
“Ian Roberts is in a sexual relationship with my wife Nicole Price and was caught in bed,” he wrote in a sworn statement. “… (Roberts pulled) a gun and put it on my forehead and said he would kill me if I took his picture.”
Hill also shared with the Register a copy of a subpoena commanding him to appear before a federal grand jury in Des Moines on Oct. 15, the day before the grand jury indicted Roberts. He said a U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives investigator interviewed him after hearing Roberts talk about him on a jailhouse recording following Roberts’ arrest.
Asked about her memory of the incident, Price told the Register, “I have no recollection of any of that.”
About a month after Hill’s arrest, a Polk County sheriff’s deputy served Roberts with a court document from Jackson County, Missouri. The next day, according to a screenshot Hill shared with the Register, Price allegedly sent him a text message referencing Hill’s restraining order.
“Just learned that my book might not be used for Des Moines Public Schools in light of the choice you made to move forward with that service WITH MY NAME ON IT,” the sender wrote.
Price told the Register she did not recall sending Hill messages about Des Moines Public Schools and that she did not discuss selling books to the district. Roeder, the district spokesperson, said he was unaware of discussions about buying books from Price.
According to the state auditor’s report, Des Moines Public Schools Chief Financial Officer Shashank Aurora denied Roberts’ request for a contract with Lively Paradox in September 2023. Aurora had found Roberts’ picture and biography under the “Our Team” section of the Lively Paradox website.
In one recording Hill shared, Price said she hoped Des Moines Public Schools would partner with her on monthly “learning-and-development sessions.”
“I was very scared after my birthday, when he got served,” she said. “Because I’m like, ‘If this dude has this kind of blemish on his record related to me, that’s a whole lot of money that I’ll never be able to realize.’ Is the Des Moines Public Schools interested in my empathy work? Absolutely they are. Are they interested in my culturally responsive leadership work? Absolutely they are. And it would be walking away from a whole lot of money if I didn’t do it.”
Auditor report finds district paid Price after CFO flagged conflict of interest
Aurora, the district CFO, told state auditors he did not share details with School Board members about Roberts’ relationship with Lively Paradox.
In September 2023, around the time Aurora discovered the issue, district officials agreed to pay Lively Paradox about $10,000 for a training session. The auditor’s report does not state who made that decision.
Price led a session on “Culturally Responsive Coaching” in October 2023. But according to the auditor’s report, Lively Paradox waived the consulting fee. Price received just $300 to reimburse her for traveling from Kansas City. The auditors wrote that district representatives “do not know why the coaching services fee was waived.”
In December 2023, School Board members wanted a consultant to evaluate the district’s leadership. According to the report, Roberts suggested the board work with Lively Paradox.
The audit report said the district paid the company about $6,500. Aurora, the district CFO, was out of the country on vacation when a controller approved the contract.
According to documents the Register obtained through a records request, Price conducted Myers-Briggs personality assessments on the district’s board members and four staffers. Price also presented a slideshow about the assessments.
Describing her findings, she listed then-board members Jackie Norris and Teree Caldwell-Johnson as the district’s “most hard charging” leaders. Kimberly Martorano and Patrick Dix, meanwhile, were the “most inventive.”
Overall, Price found, the district lacked leaders who were “fact oriented,” “feelers” or “oriented toward the future rather than the immediate moment.”
Price told the Register that Roberts did not receive money for the work she did with the district. She denied that he advocated for the School Board to contract with Lively Paradox, saying Norris called her about working together.
Norris, who was board chair at the time, told the Register she wanted a consultant to conduct a leadership assessment of the board. She suggested local companies, but Roberts “very firmly” wanted a Myers-Briggs assessment.
When she said she didn’t know anybody trained in Myers-Briggs, she recalled, Roberts suggested Price.
“He was the one who connected me to her and pushed for that,” Norris said.
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.
This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Inside the relationship between Ian Roberts and a DMPS contractor
Reporting by Tyler Jett, Des Moines Register / Des Moines Register
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