The Amagansett School’s ongoing effort to fire its tenured principal continued this week with another six hours of testimony and questioning, with the principal’s attorneys insisting that the case should be dismissed.
The principal, Maria Dorr, has been on paid leave since mid-January, amid charges that on Dec. 15, 2023, she stole from the school’s mailroom a red envelope containing a $25 Amazon gift card, intended as a holiday gift for another educator at the school. The investigation is known as a 3020-A proceeding, in which a school district must back its allegations with concrete evidence that wrongdoing has occurred in order to remove a tenured teacher or administrator. An independent hearing officer with the New York State Education Department eventually makes a ruling.
“The district has failed to meet its burden on any of the charges mentioned in this case,” said Brian Deinhart of the New York State School Administrators Association, representing Ms. Dorr alongside Arthur Scheuermann. “First and foremost,” Mr. Deinhart said, there was “no eyewitness testimony whatsoever that places Maria in the mailroom taking the card.”
The district has based its case largely on surveillance camera footage that shows Ms. Dorr entering the mailroom on Dec. 15 at 8:37 a.m. and exiting about 30 seconds later with a red envelope in her hand. Christina McElroy, the teacher who was to have received the Amazon gift card, checked her mailbox about three hours later and found nothing in it.
Ms. Dorr has asserted that she was holding a different red envelope when she left the mailroom, taken from her own mailbox, containing a Shell gas station gift card from a student, meant for her.
Over Zoom on Tuesday, the school’s attorney called three witnesses in an attempt to prove that the Shell card was not bought for Ms. Dorr in December, but rather was one of two Shell cards bought and gifted in November by a school parent. The other was reportedly given to yet another teacher, Jason Hancock.
One of the school district’s witnesses was Benedict DePietro, the manager of the Shell gas station in Amagansett where the gift card was purchased. Mr. DePietro testified that on or about Nov. 29, 2023, an employee of the station, whose son attended the Amagansett School and was in Mr. Hancock’s sixth-grade class, bought two Shell gift cards.
That employee’s boyfriend, Michael Davis, then testified that one of the Shell cards was given to Mr. Hancock inside a “season’s greetings” card during parent-teacher conferences in November. Mr. Davis said the other was presented to Ms. Dorr that same day, in an identical card. According to court papers, the identification number on the gift card Ms. Dorr received matched the gas station’s transaction records.
Mr. Hancock himself also testified on Tuesday, saying that he used his Shell card soon after but no longer possessed the card it came in. He was, however, able to recognize a photo of that holiday card, which Ms. Dorr’s attorneys had entered as evidence to show that she had in fact received a gift card of her own.
In his motion to dismiss, Mr. Deinhart characterized the district’s witness testimony and evidence as “circumstantial.” Steven Goodstadt, representing the school, disagreed: “In a case like this,” he said, “such evidence is not better or worse — it’s just different.” Mr. Deinhart had questioned why the district never called Ms. McElroy herself to testify; Mr. Goodstadt said her testimony would have been “irrelevant” because the Amazon gift card in the red envelope was never found.
“There is no other option except for Maria Dorr stole the gift card,” Mr. Goodstadt stated. He later asserted that if she indeed received her gift card on Nov. 29, as the witnesses had testified, “How could she possibly pull it out of her mailbox on Dec. 15? She did not.” He did acknowledge that there were some “inconsistencies” in a report written by Richard Loeschner, Amagansett’s interim superintendent from October 2023 through June, that has served as a piece of evidence.
Timothy Taylor, the hearing officer, reserved a decision on Mr. Deinhart’s motion to dismiss, saying he would need to review the complete record. “That would take quite a bit of time . . . I’m going to reserve until I have time to actually do that.”
Following the testimony of Mr. Davis, Mr. DePietro, and Mr. Hancock, Mr. Goodstadt said the district was finished calling its witnesses. Then it was Ms. Dorr’s attorneys’ turn. Their first witness was Seth Turner, a former Amagansett School superintendent whose contract the district bought out last fall amid considerable turmoil over the school climate and safety concerns.
Ellen Vega, one of the school’s attorneys, objected to Mr. Turner as a witness. “Mr. Turner separated from his employment in October 2023, and this case involves a card stolen nearly two months after Mr. Turner had left. . . . Mr. Scheuermann [another of Ms. Dorr’s lawyers] noted [Mr. Turner’s] testimony would be based on Ms. Dorr’s work performance and her character. We already have on the record previous evaluations over the past five years, and those documents speak for themselves.”
But Mr. Turner was allowed to testify. “Ms. Dorr is an excellent building principal,” he said. He later added that “she did a fine job, a wonderful job, with an outstanding reputation for honesty.”
Mr. Turner was asked whether he knew of allegations that Ms. Dorr had taken $200 from the school PTA. He replied that he did hear that, and that he had reported it to the East Hampton Town Police Department, which determined that the box containing the missing money had not been in Ms. Dorr’s possession, but rather in the hands of another teacher.
Mr. Turner later testified, speaking further of Ms. Dorr’s integrity, that he and she had returned large gifts, including “literally a box filled with cash,” that some parents had tried giving to teachers for Christmas.
The former superintendent also sought to discredit a witness whose own testimony had been critical to the district’s charges against Ms. Dorr: Cassie Butts, an Amagansett School office worker who has since retired. Mr. Scheuermann had presented in evidence a confidential document revealing that Ms. Butts had been counseled in the past for “making exaggerated and/or unsubstantiated claims against school district personnel.”
Mr. Turner said he’d discovered that document only when it was flagged by the district’s email server — someone within the school had sent it to an outside address — and that he needed to investigate it as a breach of security. He acknowledged taking a copy of the document with him upon leaving Amagansett in October, and later providing it to Ms. Dorr’s attorneys.
In cross-examining the former superintendent, Mr. Goodstadt asserted Mr. Turner had taken this document improperly. He called its admission into evidence “the fruit of the poisonous tree.”
“He said he took documents upon separation,” the attorney told the hearing officer. “This is a school district document that had no relevance to him. He basically stole a document.”
Mr. Taylor disagreed. “I don’t know if it was stolen. I don’t know what the policy is for superintendents who are leaving service . . . and what they can and cannot take with them. He can take a box of stuff from his desk, that doesn’t make it improper. I don’t know what the policy is.”
“I made sure that I maintained any evidence I might need to protect my reputation,” Mr. Turner said, “because I couldn’t trust the people in Amagansett, because they had a propensity for fabricating stories. So I needed to take every piece of documentation I might need to prove that I was an excellent administrator.”
As Tuesday’s hearing wound to its 4:30 p.m. close, Mr. Taylor and both sides’ lawyers adjourned to a private conference for nearly half an hour. When they returned, the hearing officer announced that he would include Mr. Deinhart’s motion for summary judgement in the closing remarks, after Ms. Dorr’s attorneys finish calling witnesses. “We’re going to wait to do that until the end. That’s what we decided to do,” Mr. Taylor said.
The hearing will continue on Monday, Oct. 14, with more testimony from Mr. Turner and possibly others. A decision on the case is not expected until sometime in November, almost a year after the disappearance of Ms. McElroy’s red envelope.
This story has been updated since it was first published to correct a statement made by one of the attorneys.