BURLINGTON — An attorney for former Windsor School principal Tiffany Riley has accused the Mount Ascutney School District Board of “mischaracterizing” the facts surrounding her firing last year.
“There are two very different realities in this case,” one of Riley’s attorneys, Andrew Snow, wrote in court documents filed in U.S. District Court in Rutland on Feb. 12. He accused the School Board of trying to “cover up (their) initial wrongful behavior” by saying she was fired in October, rather than June.
The filing is the latest in a lawsuit Riley brought against her former employer last summer claiming they fired her unjustly following a June 10 Facebook post, which was seen by some as critical of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The district put Riley on paid administrative leave on June 12, and the School Board released a statement at the time saying, in part, “Because of this glaring miscomprehension of the situation, we feel unanimously that Ms. Riley’s continued role as our school leader damages the school and its students.”
In September, the School Board held a termination hearing and issued an Oct. 14 decision saying they were firing Riley.
At the core of the debate between Riley and the board is the question of exactly when she was terminated.
In a motion for summary judgment filed late last year, Riley claimed her leave in June constituted a firing, since district and board members made public statements saying she had no future working for the school. She wrote that the board fired her without any kind of official termination hearing, which is required by state law.
But in a response to her motion filed Feb. 2, attorneys for the district wrote that Riley is trying to “selectively reframe the facts as a matter of law.”
The board claims she was merely put on leave in June, and that she kept receiving pay and benefits as part of her $113,000 salary until she was officially fired in October following the appropriate termination hearing.
Pietro Lynn, an attorney for the district, added that under state law the board has to vote on a principal’s firing, so it’s impossible she was officially fired before that vote was made.
“This motion is part of Ms. Riley’s legal strategy to best position her claims and undermine the School Board’s statutory authority based on the fiction that the Board fired her on June 12,” Lynn wrote in the response.
In last week’s document, Snow claimed that argument was a mischaracterization of the facts of the case and that the board was attempting to “create an alternate reality.”
He said the School Board and superintendent “reacted quickly and forcefully,” in the days following the June 10 post, and that in doing so, they “took steps that were wrong. They made statements that could not be taken back.”
“That is the reality of the case, and everyone understood what happened — Tiffany Riley had been terminated for her Facebook post.”
He claimed that the board decided to hold a termination hearing only after Riley raised concerns that the alleged termination was unjust.
“Only then did defendants begin to try and say that what happened didn’t really happen,” he wrote.
Riley’s motion for summary judgment is set to go in front of a judge in federal court in Rutland on Feb. 23, according to court documents.
Anna Merriman can be reached at amerriman@vnews.com or 603-727-3216.