New Haven Independent

They testified last Friday at the latest session of an ongoing public hearing in Branford involving Farina (at left in photo), a tenured teacher at the Mary T. Murphy elementary school for the last 27 years. Farina is fighting to save her job.

Several witnesses disclosed at her termination hearing that Farina’s troubles were not recent—- as her legal team claims. They testified she was having trouble teaching even as a kindergarten teacher, a position she held for more than two decades.

Two paraprofessionals testified that the kindergarten parents knew Farina was struggling; her colleagues knew it; and her former school principal, Kathryn Sassu, knew it and tried but failed to get documentation from within.

The public hearing now underway is rare. Most teacher termination hearings are held behind closed doors and conducted by outside arbitrators. But Farina, 49, went public.

The hearing resumes Friday at 9 a.m and is expected to run to 9 p.m. It will be held at Community House on Church Street. Farina is expected to testify.

The school system’s case against Farina ended last week. In all, nine specialized teachers and several paraprofessionals gave testimony against her. Each worked directly with Farina in her classroom or tutored her in her classroom. They took the audience into the classroom.

Their testimony, too, is a rare event. In the world of teachers there is an understood code of silence. Typically they do not speak out. Sometimes their union tells them not to. In this case, they testified on behalf of the school administration.

Most of them cast their eyes away from Farina as they described her disorganized classroom, her failure to hold a class together, her lack of teaching skills and her bleak attitude. They noted that she did not focus when they gave model lessons. They said she was not engaged. Instead of listening she would sit at her desk writing checks or filing her nails. Several witnesses commented on her nail filing.

The colleagues’ appearance against Farina caught Mica Notz, Farina’s paralegal adviser, by surprise. She tried to keep their testimony out. Farina has also filed a federal lawsuit against her school’s top administrators.

At one point, Notz threatened to walk out, shouting “We are concluding this hearing.” She was told it was not in her purview to do that. Notz maintained the nine witnesses should not be called to testify because they were only questioned a few weeks ago, after the termination process began. “They are not relevant,” she said.

At another point she threatened to go to court. Then the lawyer overseeing her work, David N. Axelrod of Woodbridge, asked for a short recess. When they returned the hearing resumed. The hearings have been contentious.

Attorney Michael J. Rose, who represents the school administration, told the panel he was entitled to call witnesses to corroborate his case. He said he also wanted to rebut Notz’s chief claim, that Farina was a fine teacher through her kindergarten years who only began to have problems when Anthony Buono, a new principal, arrived a few years ago.

Gail Riccitilli (pictured) served as a paraprofessional and reading specialist in Farina’s kindergarten class from 1998 to 2002. She gave a critical portrait of classroom life. So did another special ed paraprofessional, who told the three-person Board of Education panel that the negative attitude in the class was so debilitating that she asked to be transferred out.

Riccitilli did not mince words: “Many parents came up to me and asked if I could be the teacher. They told me they were not happy with the classroom teacher. I told Sassu. The principal asked me if I could document the issues. I told her it was not my job. It made me uncomfortable and I would not do it.”

On a typical day, she said, she and not Farina, read to the whole class. “I did the reading. I sat in a rocking chair and read to them. Then the children would read the book back to me. Farina was at her desk, doing her checkbook, filing her nails.”

At one point, Riccitilli said Principal Sassu called her to her office. “She told me I was enabling Denise, I was doing too much work in class, that it was Denise’s job and not my job. Later she pulled me out of her class. But that didn’t last long. Nobody else would work with Denise, the principal said. So back I went.”

Riccitilli had her own children at the Murphy school. She told the panel that her son, now 24, had Mrs. Farina as his kindergarten teacher. “Having observed her I was one of the parents who said I don’t want my daughter in her class,” she said.

She also said a number of the kids in the class were afraid of her because she yelled a lot.

“Did you share those concerns with the administration?” Rose asked.

She did, she said. “Kathryn Sassu came to me and we talked. Later Farina was called to the principal’s office. She came back to the classroom crying.”

“You have no idea what they talked about?” Rose asked.

“No, but she came back crying,” she said.

She described the curriculum as “color, cut and paste,” and not much more. She said the whole situation made her uncomfortable because to do something about it “puts someone in an embarrassing spot. How do you do that? It says you are not doing your job.”

“Do you know how principal Sassu evaluated her that year?” Rose asked. “No, I do not.”

And what about the responsibility to the children,” Rose asked. “I felt it was the administration’s job.”

“So nothing was done?”

“Not that I am aware of,” she replied.

Betsy Romanelli, (pictured) a paraprofessional at the school for 11 years, told the panel she worked in Farina’s kindergarten classroom in 2003, the year after Riccitilli left.

She left after three and one-half months, telling Principal Sassu that she could no longer be in the room. “I chose not to be associated with it anymore.” She found the environment in the room to be negative, she said. “It was dispirited and from my viewpoint there was little if any interaction between the teacher and the students in a positive way.”

Asked to explain the negative environment, she said she felt the children in the classroom “were demeaned; there was an angry tone to the room. I felt that there was impatience, and uh, a lot of yelling, and tears.”

Farina, she said, did the yelling. Sometimes, she said, Farina would say “another horrible start to another horrible day.” During this period Farina was fighting serious illnesses and often she was feeling terrible, Notz said later.

Asked about the level of learning in the classroom, Romanelli paused. “Outside of an occasional lesson of going over a letter in the alphabet, I don’t recall any other instruction going on,” she said.

Rose asked what she was doing. “In my memory, the student would color or have snacks,” she said. “She would be at her desk. She would do personal things. Such as banking, writing greeting cards, letting writing. I don’t recall her on the phone.”

Romanelli was in charge of one special education student. Her student would get upset. “My child would say: ‘Color, color, color that is all we ever do is color,’ and then he would throw his pencil,” she said.

Do you recall her saying something about a student’s mother? she was asked. She paused. “Yes. She said to me that his mother should have kept her legs crossed.”

For Romanelli that comment did it. “I went to talk to Mrs. Sassu. We talked quite a bit. She told me she was aware. She called me that night and told me she was moving my child to another kindergarten class.”

More recently Maureen Haggen, a reading specialist at Mary Murphy, said Farina failed to complete her work for the Developmental Reading Assessment (DRA) test, leaving some of her fourth grade students without assessments. This is a key test, given three times a year in September, January and May. It gauges progress. Without it there is no information for that student. (Student test scores have come up at each of the hearings. At one Notz disclosed that she had used confidential student test scores Farina had taken from a school website in apparent violation of federal law.)

Notz asked her if Farina was on medical leave when she did some of these exams. The witness said she was.

“Prior to three weeks ago when Mr. Rose talked to you, did anyone ask about Mrs. Farina?” Notz asked.

“No, no one did,” she said.

The school system’s final witness was Assistant Superintendent Dr. Mary Peraro (pictured), who spent a year assessing Ms. Farina’s abilities.

In 20 minutes she told the hearing that she evaluated Farina during the spring of 2009 when Farina was teaching second grade.

She documented all evaluations, meetings, lesson plans, e-mails, and student work in a file that was about 4 to 5 inches thick. She also offered guidance to her, and provided her with templates for lesson plans.

Peraro said Farina seemed to have difficulty “keeping the students on task.” She said despite all the help that Farina was receiving, she was still having difficulty.

“At times I felt she was overwhelmed,” Peraro said.

She testified that at the end of the school year, she recommended that Farina should not continue to teach. “I didn’t think she had the skills necessary to teach,” Peraro said, adding that she was concerned about the students.

“There was not a lot of learning going on.”

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