New Haven Independent

Farina, a tenured teacher at Mary T. Murphy Elementary School in Branford, spent nearly the entire day on the stand at a hearing at the Community House in the final session of testimony in what has been a grueling hearing. School officials want to terminate her. She wants to keep her job.

Attorneys for both sides must submit their final briefs by noon Friday to William Connon, the Board of Education’s outside counsel, who serves as hearing overseer. A Board of Education subcommittee, which has spent weeks hearing the case, will meet Tuesday at 8:30 a.m. at the Community House to discuss the case and make a recommendation to the full board.

Farina, 49, took the stand at her termination hearing after weeks of listening to devastating testimony from top Branford School officials as well as colleagues about her alleged failures as a teacher, her poor lesson plans and her inability to learn new techniques. Her failures, some testified, predated her illness and were visible when she taught kindergarten. She has been a teacher for 27 years.

She told the subcommittee and the audience that while she was not a perfect teacher, she had received satisfactory evaluations at the Murphy school for more than two decades. She was articulate and precise on the stand though at times seemed pained by the events she had faced.

Mica Notz, Farina’s paralegal and lead advocate, said the teacher’s troubles began when she developed thyroid cancer. She sought to show through Farina’s testimony that school administrators failed to provide support because they wanted her out. She said her union was of little help.

School attorney Michael J. Rose painted a portrait under cross-examination of a teacher who would not respond to constructive criticism if she did not believe the school principal or other supervisors were correct, and who faced difficulties long before her illness developed.

It became clear at this hearing that school administrators wanted Farina to resign her position. Notz disclosed that a mediation hearing to settle a federal lawsuit filed on behalf of Farina took place in April 2008. Farina was asked to resign or face termination. Rose berated Notz for disclosing the mediation effort, saying it was “sacrosanct” and was supposed to remain private.

“So you knew for a year that they wanted you out,” Notz asked. “So why didn’t you resign?” Farina replied: “I didn’t want to.”

As it turned out Notz had the wrong date. The mediation effort, Rose announced after checking with his office, took place a year later, in April 2009.

Farina took the stand shortly before 11 a.m. She said she had a college and a masters degree, plus additional graduate courses.

She said until the 2003 school year she had never been issued any evaluation that pointed to severe deficiencies in her teaching.

But that year, she said, she began to feel “extreme fatigue, extreme fatigue and terrible insomnia. I was not feeling well.” She made frequent trips to the doctor. Eventually she was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. She said despite the symptoms she was teaching “to the best of my ability. I don’t recall any decrease in my attendance. I was teaching.”

By the end of that year, she said, then-Principal Kathryn Sassu issued her first negative evaluation.

Farina described a pattern of conduct on the part of school officials over the next five years that seemed heartless and indifferent.

For example, she said that in 2006 when Anthony Buono was the principal he put her on a Teacher Improvement Program in order to deal with her repeated lateness and her low Connecticut mastery test scores.

She learned she was to go on a three month TIP just before she left on medical leave to have surgery. She said all fourth-grade classes at Murphy had low scores. “I was the only one put on TIP for low scores,” she claimed.

She stayed on the plan until she went for surgery in November. She said she was in the hospital recuperating when she learned that she had been placed on an Intensive Teacher Improvement Program (ITIP).

“So you were placed on an intensive plan while on medical leave?” Notz asked.

“Yes,” Farina said.

She said over that school year she felt she was being held to a different standard from the one for other fourth-grade teachers. But Principal Buono has testified otherwise, saying Farina was the only fourth-grade teacher whose overall standardized scores went down. He described her as unable to follow through even when given intense outside help.

“I was scrutinized. It was wrong. Anything I did was wrong. I was trying and nothing I did was right, nothing was good enough.”

She said the lateness issue became absurd.

“If I was a half-second late, I would get a memo. But if I walked in with another colleague or two, and we were a few minutes late I would get nothing.” She said she would get a memo if she were “two seconds, ten seconds, one minute or two minutes late.” Many times she would run to sign in and then go back to her car to get the many book bags she carried. “I didn’t want to be a minute or half a minute late.”

She said she felt that everything was in gear to terminate her. “Every little thing I did they were trying to do get rid of me. That was pretty obvious. There was a lot of bias,” she said.

When she arrived in late August for the 2007-08 school year, again teaching fourth grade, she was placed on the intensive TIP. She said Principal Buono “never said a word.” She learned about it via snail mail and email.

She said at one point she and Buono met in his office to discuss the ITIP. Notz asked her if made any statements regarding her health.

“I was told that I was a liability,” she said.

At the word “liability,” Carrano turned to her.

“Did he [Buono] specifically indicate that your health issues were a liability?”

“I was a liability,” she said.

Notz asked for the context of the statement. Farina replied that she had been talking about her insomnia and her cancer. The response: “I was saying I was doing the best I could. And in response he said I was a liability.”

Michael Krause, another Board of Ed member assigned to the panel, sought further explanation because the implication was that her health costs were the reason for her potential termination.

“Your liability in your opinion was because of your tardiness, or because of your health?” he asked.

“Definitely my health issues,” she said.

“Did he say, ‘Health’?,” Krause asked, getting specific.

“He did not,” she said. “He just said, ‘You are a liability.’”

Farina’s placement on the intensive TIP program coincided with the introduction of a controversial new math program in the elementary schools.

She and her colleagues would collaborate. When she presented ways to teach that showed success among her colleagues. these same ideas were shot down when presented to her supervisors, Farina claimed. The implication was that “it was OK for them but not me.”

She said the new math program was particularly demanding, an observation other teachers and parents have made. If students needed additional help, if they were struggling, it was almost impossible to stop to help them, she said.

“We had to move ahead,” she said.

Carrano asked: “Were you told that?”

She said the math specialist informed teachers they had to move forward, they had to “complete the unit.” (Several Branford parents have started a new website whose goal is to change the way math is taught in the public schools. The state’s math scores have plummeted.)

Earlier in the day Richard Terrill (pictured), a veteran education administrator in North Branford and Farina’s brother-in-law, said Farina came to him for advice after she was put on the first TIP plan. He reviewed what she showed him. “In all honesty I helped Ms. Farina formulate some of the rebuttal.” He said the TIP plan she was put on was designed well.

He said he was surprised the first TIP plan was for only three months, because there would no evidence of improvement until the Connecticut Mastery Test scores came out the following summer. There would be no way to tell if Farina improved or not, he said.

He said he did not think Farina’s supervisors, especially her last one, Dr. Mary Peraro, observed her teach for a significant amount of time.

“They looked at all the observations, not just this one, and came to the conclusion that she was incompetent.” He conceded under cross-examination he had not read Peraro’s entire file.

In his cross-examination of Farina, Rose made the case that Farina found it difficult to change if she rejected the criticism. For example, she simply rejected Principal Sassu’s criticism because “she wasn’t in my classroom.” He also elicited that three different administrators spanning three different administrations at the Mary Murphy School assessed her abilities negatively, including Michael Iovanna, former Murphy assistant principal, whom she especially respected. At one point she said they were biased but early in the process she conceded they were not.

Rose managed to elicit from her that she had been given help both inside and outside her school during her TIP programs, which lasted four years. But her lesson plans remained poor and they are at the heart of every day teaching, evaluators said. In the end, she said, “I would still continue to work hard.”

From her point of view she was doing her best. She said she did not know what to think of the continuing negative feedback she was getting. “For me I felt … I was teaching, doing lesson plans. Collaborating with my colleagues. But I knew it was going to difficult because I was getting negative evaluations.” She complained that she would be told she was doing well in class and then receive devastating written reports. I was shocked.”

Even after Schools Superintendent Dr. Kathleen Halligan received all those negative evaluations, year after year, “she still gave you another chance, right?” asked Rose.

(Halligan’s repeated improvement plans are now the subject of a union grievance.)

“Yes,” Farina said.

That chance ended on the day she filed a federal lawsuit against school authorities. Then Halligan moved to fire her. Farina and her law team then took the highly unusual step of airing her case in public. The federal lawsuit awaits trial.

###