Opinion ID: 618676
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Incidents

Text: From 2004 until 2007, Nagle worked as a tenure-track special education teacher at the Chatsworth Avenue School in the Mamaroneck Union Free School District of New York (the District). On March 2, 2007, the school's principal, Defendant-Appellee Steven Castar, and the District's assistant superintendent for human resources, Rosemarie Coletti, informed Nagle that the District's superintendent of schools, Defendant-Appellee Paul Fried, had decided not to recommend her for tenure. Castar and Coletti informed Nagle that, therefore, her probationary employment with the District would be terminated at the end of the school year. Nagle filed suit, claiming that Fried's decision not to recommend her for tenure violated her First Amendment rights because it was made in retaliation for two acts that, she argued, were protected by the First Amendment. The more recent of these acts took place in January 2007, after Nagle received a copy of a teaching observation report of her class written and signed by the Chatsworth Avenue School's assistant principal, Paula Marron. Nagle had declined to sign the report, but the copy she received appeared to bear her signature. Upon receiving the report, Nagle told Marron, Castar, and John Esposito, the president of Nagle's teachers' union, about the seemingly false signature. After Castar informed him of the alleged forgery, Fried called the police, who determined that no crime had been committed. Nevertheless, Nagle and the District separately hired handwriting experts, each of whom concluded that Marron had signed Nagle's name. Thereafter, Fried declined to renew Marron's contract for the following year, and Marron resigned. The other act on which Nagle based her claim took place during the 2002-2003 school year, while Nagle was a special education teacher in a public school in Henrico County, Virginia. Nagle had reported to her principal in Virginia that she overheard Betty Moore, a teacher in a neighboring classroom, verbally abusing children in her class. Nagle also informed the chair of the Henrico County Early Childhood Special Education Program Department of reports Nagle had gotten from other adults working in the school who had witnessed Moore both verbally and physically abusing children under her care. [4] After a private nurse attending to one of Moore's students reported that she had witnessed Moore strike a child in the chest, Moore resigned from the school, citing family reasons. But Moore kept her teaching license. Nagle then conveyed what she had told school administrators to Virginia's Department of Child Protective Services and to the state police. After a police investigation, Moore was charged with several counts of felony child abuse; she eventually pled guilty to assault. Nagle's conduct in Virginia took place approximately four years before Superintendent Fried declined to recommend her for tenure in New York; according to record testimony, however, Castar and Fried only learned of Nagle's conduct in early 2007, shortly before Nagle was informed of Fried's tenure decision. Nagle argues that the temporal proximity between Fried's learning of the reported abuse incident and his decision not to recommend her for tenure gives rise to an inference of retaliation. Appellees contend that Fried had already made his decision regarding Nagle's tenure before he found out about her report of abuse in Virginia; thus, the Virginia report played no role in the employment decision. Instead, they assert, the tenure decision was based on Nagle's alleged behavior during a December 2006 meeting. Over the course of this meeting, Castar raised his concerns regarding two instances where Nagle allegedly violated school protocols. The first involved Nagle choosing a book to read with her class without first consulting the school psychologist; the second involved Nagle sending a child home from school early without first consulting school administrators. Nagle was so distraught by what she heard that she left the meeting crying.