BOE Committee Votes to Fire Denise Farina

After deliberating for nearly four hours, a Board of Education committee Tuesday ruled tenured elementary school teacher Denise Farina to be incompetent and recommended the full board terminate her.

The subcommittee’s decision came after the panel held nine days of hearings featuring 25 sworn witnesses and nearly 300 exhibits.

“The record is voluminous,” William Connon, the hearing overseer, said at one point. The committee met at the Community House. Connon noted that parents and paralegals had testified. He said that both groups were entitled to testify about factual issues but would not be allowed to draw professional evaluations.

The Board of Education is expected to take up the Farina case at its Nov. 18 meeting. If they approve, Farina has 30 days to appeal in Superior Court. She is expected to do so. Farina, 49, has been suspended with pay. Her salary will end if the full board terminates her. She could not be reached for comment.

Superintendent of Schools Dr. Kathleen Halligan recommended that Farina be fired because she was either unable or unwilling to improve. The teacher has been described as disorganized and persistently late. Overall, Halligan said, the children in her class were not receiving an adequate education. The former union president testified the union did not provide support. Farina agreed.

Ms. Farina testified that she was hampered in recent years by serious illnesses, including cancer, back surgeries and insomnia; and school authorities did nothing to help her.

Farina, 49, was not present when the committee examined two separate sets of findings, one from the school administration’s attorney Michael J. Rose and the other from the paralegal representing her, Mica Notz. Notz was present and took notes. She did not speak and was not expected to. She left before the the deliberations ended.

The Farina hearing was unique — because it was open to the public. Farina wanted that. She said she wanted the board to know how her supervisors had treated her.

Typically teacher termination hearings take place in private before an arbitration panel. In this case, not only was the hearing public but so were the deliberations of the panel this morning.

Under state statute, a tenured teacher may be terminated for a variety of reasons, including inefficiency or incompetence. Typically these hearings are fairly straightforward and narrow in scope. But Notz sought to obtain evidence on whether Farina received accommodations for her illness, a key part of a federal lawsuit she has filed against the school’s top administrators. In the end this line of testimony was denied.

For more than four hours the committee pored over findings presented by each side and either accepted them, modified them or eliminated them. The context under which they viewed Farina was not as a new, relatively inexperienced teacher in need of help, but as an experienced teacher whose foundation had already been built.

David Squires, one of the subcommittee members, was the first to speak after the panel reached the point of decision.

“The preponderance of the evidence is to recommend termination,” he said, referring to the legal standard employed in these cases.

Frank Carrano, the current head of the Board of Education, presided over the subcommittee panel.

“For me it is about the kids,” he said. ​“I agree. I see a preponderance of evidence. Miss Farina has been in the system of 27 or 28 years. She was still having trouble with lesson plans” despite intensive intervention, he said.

Michael Krause, another board member, called the whole situation ​“very unfortunate. We have to be primarily concerned about the kids, like Frank said.” He said that Farina had had four or five years of intensive improvement programs. ​“She should not have needed that after teaching for 24 years.

Krause was concerned, he said, that school authorities had not transferred her to another school when she claimed bias by school authorities. ​“Did they give her the best shot possible?” he asked. Carrano pointed out that a number of other administrators besides those at Mary Murphy evaluated her. In the past she had received satisfactory evaluations. A transfer also depends upon vacancies occurring in other schools.

In the end the panel voted to terminate Farina. Connon (pictured) read the final language: ​“We move that the subcommittee procedural adviser is directed to compile in writing the findings adopted by the subcommittee and based on the finding the subcommittee recommends to the Board of Education that Miss Farina’s contract be terminated because she is unwilling or unable to improve her professional practices.”

The three committee members said ​“aye.”

“That concludes our business,” Connon said.

He said afterward that he will draw up the final document based on the decision the committee made and forward it to the Board of Education as soon as possible.

One controversial issue the panel discussed was whether Farina’s standardized testing scores improved in the years when she taught fourth grade.

The committee arrived at Rose’s topic #15, an apparent reference to Principal Anthony Buono’s concerns over Farina’s students’ disappointing scores on the Connecticut Mastery Test (CMT). Connon noted that ​“we had issues of whether documents were provided to both sides,” a reference to Notz’s statement at the hearings that she has never been given the scores.

Connon asked: ​“Can you reach a conclusion without referencing the CMT? It would be cleaner.”

The tests are objective standards by which to judge, other committee members noted. Krause said that how students fared on the tests would affect the Teacher Improvement Plans that Farina had been placed on.

In the end it appeared that the CMT scores, the subject of much dispute during the hearings, would not be part of the final decision making.