Razzle Dazzle
Amateur Sleuths Taint Case

By RICHARD STEIER

The case against Hillary Stringfellow began with two teenage boys who allegedly bragged about having sex with her being overheard by a teenage girl.

The adolescent boasting gathered the wings of accepted fact when the girl reported what she'd heard to three of Ms. Stringfellow's colleagues at the Acorn High School for Social Justice in Brooklyn and one of them remembered seeing her buying food at McDonald's for the two boys.

The two Teachers and a Paraprofessional took it upon themselves to pursue an investigation; the first time it came to the attention of the proper authorities was when Ms. Stringfellow, anxious to clear her name, told Acorn Principal Joseph Parker about the rumors.

That launched a probe by the school system's Special Commissioner of Investigation, Richard J. Condon, that led to his recommendation that the three Teachers who did the investigating be fired, and that Ms. Stringfellow be disciplined.

No Evidence of Sexual Misconduct

What is most notable about the potential career casualties resulting from the incident is that, as far as the staffer Mr. Condon assigned to the case could determine, Ms. Stringfellow did not have sex with the two boys, who are 18 and 19.

The Chief-Leader/Adrienne Haywood-James TRAIL MUDDIED BY AMATEUR PROBERS' FOOTPRINTS: Richard Condon, the Special Commissioner of Investigation for the school system, says his office couldn't reach a definitive conclusion about whether a Teacher had sex with two of her students because, while the denials of all three were credible, the investigative trail had been trampled by three other school employees who conducted their own probe rather than informing their superiors.

"Everything she told us that we could substantiate was substantiated," Mr. Condon said during a Nov. 21 interview. His investigator spoke to the two boys, who both denied having had sex with Ms. Stringfellow, and "his sense was that they were telling the truth."

The chief schools prober nonetheless recommended disciplinary action against her because back in March, following a school basketball game she had taken the 19- year-old out to dinner and then went for ice cream with him, before leaving to meet up with another female Teacher.

Even if the rest of her relationship with the two boys was nothing deeper than the involvement of a caring Teacher, Mr. Condon said, that evening was "still inappropriate. She should not be going out with a student. This one was easy because of the dinner after the basketball game and the two of them being alone together."

He sought harsher penalties against the three school employees who, apparently convinced that their superiors lacked the discretion to handle the case properly, chose to hold their own investigation. The reason for coming down so hard on them was simple, Mr. Condon said: the three - Teachers Kendra Newkirk and Sharion Thomas and Paraprofessional Tiffany Washington - compromised the possibility of a proper investigation by speaking to the two male students and Ms. Stringfellow about what they had heard.

"They precluded us from doing surveillance," said Mr. Condon, a former high-ranking NYPD official who briefly served as Police Commissioner at the end of Ed Koch's mayoralty.

Ms. Stringfellow said that after Ms. Newkirk confronted her about the allegations, she denied them and said she wanted to report them to Acorn's administration. She told the investigator, according to Mr. Condon's report, that the three women "said not to do so because the administration was too new and would report the allegation immediately."

The three women had prior suspicions about Ms. Stringfellow that began with Ms. Thomas seeing Ms. Stringfellow and the 19-year-old boy leave the basketball game together, even though they were accompanied by another Teacher, Allison Reilly, who dropped off the two of them at a restaurant and then met up with Ms. Stringfellow later that night. Ms. Thomas also reported that she had seen a picture drawn by the student of himself and Ms. Stringfellow hanging in her colleague's classroom. The investigator later found that only Ms. Stringfellow's image was in the picture, and a depiction of the student was later stapled to it.

'Lacked Ability, Authority to Probe'

What surprised him most, Mr. Condon said, was that "one, [the other school employees] didn't report it and, two, that they investigated it themselves. They may have considered that they had the discretion, but they didn't have the ability or the authority to conduct an investigation." It was far more typical, he explained, for a Teacher or Guidance Counselor to get a report of improper sexual conduct by a Teacher toward a student and decide, without conducting their own probe, not to inform their superiors.

"Sometimes we get anonymous reports," he said, which almost certainly come from school employees. "It's like they're saying, 'I want to tell you what happened but I don't want to be personally involved.'''

The 19-year-old told Mr. Condon's investigator that he "talked on the phone a lot" with Ms. Stringfellow but denied making the statement about a sexual relationship with her that the female student claimed to have overheard.

Platonic Socializing?

The 18-year-old boy said that he sometimes spoke to Ms. Stringfellow by phone, discussing "school work and personal things" but nothing inappropriate. He said that she had taken him, the 19-year-old, and other students out to McDonald's and for pizza occasionally. He accused the girl who said he had talked about having sex with Ms. Stringfellow of lying.

Mr. Condon's investigator checked Ms. Stringfellow's cell-phone records and found that over an eight-month period beginning last October she had called the 19-year-old 56 times and the 18-year-old 68 times. The 18-year-old had said that Ms. Stringfellow called to wake him up for school, and the probe showed that many of the calls were placed within short time-spans, indicating that he might not have been awakened by the first call. It was also discovered that the 19-year-old called Ms. Stringfellow 15 times during an overlapping period, the last time more than five weeks after the Teacher had reported the allegation to her Principal.

Mr. Condon acknowledged that the calls, while unusual in their frequency, might signify nothing more than that Ms. Stringfellow was a caring Teacher who had taken an interest in her students. If there had been nothing more alleged than the early-morning phone calls to the 18-year-old, he said, "I don't know that we would've even investigated that."

He estimated that 25 to 30 percent of the matters brought to his office's attention involve sexual misconduct by school staff. Those are also the cases that draw the greatest media attention, and so there is a much-greater awareness of the impropriety involved than there was several decades ago, when sexual relationships between Teachers and students rarely became public.

Guidelines to Follow

Some Teachers get involved in their students' lives without there being a sexual component, but Mr. Condon indicated that, like Caesar's wife, they must ensure that their behavior is beyond reproach. They should be sure, he said, that the interaction "does not become a personal relationship" where sex or romance is part of the equation. If a Teacher is dealing with a student outside of the school, he said, "The first thing is you should have parental permission."

Based on her conversations with his investigator, Mr. Condon said, Ms. Stringfellow did not grasp that her dealings with the two boys could be perceived as inappropriate even if she was not actually crossing over into forbidden territory.

"She was insistent that she had not had a sexual relationship with any of these students," he said. "And I think she did not think she was doing anything wrong at the time she was doing it. She said she talked to these kids about school subjects and personal subjects but that there was nothing sexual."

"I'm not sure," he continued, "how much thought she gave to" how her conduct might be viewed by others.

Ms. Stringfellow has been removed from her classroom at Acorn and is currently assigned to a Department of Education relocation center, awaiting word on how she will be disciplined, according to the United Federation of Teachers.

'Wrong to Punish Her'

She declined comment on the case, but a UFT spokesman, Ron Davis, said in a statement, "It's outrageous to have this devoted Teacher sitting idle in an administrative office away from her students while the Department of Education sits on the special investigator's report. It will be even more outrageous if the department punishes her for checking in on her students and taking an interest in their well-being the way any caring Teacher would."

As Mr. Condon noted, the decision by the two other Teachers and the Paraprofessional to conduct their own probe and then confront Ms. Stringfellow alerted her to the suspicions and thus made it far more difficult to investigate her than if she was unaware her conduct was being scrutinized. That was why he recommended harsher penalties against Ms. Newkirk, Ms. Thomas and Ms. Washington: his office could prove more egregious violations on their part than it could establish regarding Ms. Stringfellow.

A Department of Education spokesman did not respond by presstime to questions about the status of those three. The UFT spokesman said that Ms. Newkirk, who had been a per-diem sub at Acorn, has been fired and placed on the school system's ineligible list for future employment, and no action has yet been taken against Ms. Thomas and Ms. Washington.

Their amateur sleuthing, apparently from the belief that they knew better than school administrators how to handle an explosive allegation about a colleague, has almost surely ended their careers in the school system. It has placed a cloud over Ms. Stringfellow's future even if her worst sin was poor judgment.

A Positive Effect?

Mr. Condon said he wasn't sure whether severe penalties for Ms. Newkirk, Ms. Thomas and Ms. Washington because of their improper response to the initial allegation might prompt more school employees to do what they're supposed to when they learn of alleged sexual misconduct.

"There's probably a percentage who would report it under any circumstances, and a percentage who would not under any circumstances," he said. "And then there's some who may now say, 'It's not worth it to me to risk my job by not reporting this allegation.'''