Winners and Losers

An administrative hearing officer has cleared Maria Dorr of charges that she might have stolen a gift card, worth $25 or $50, while on duty as principal of Amagansett School. She’s back at work, and now we can all move on.

Not so fast.

It’s appalling that this was a game rigged from the start. If Dorr — who, to her great credit, requested an open hearing instead of facing a star chamber behind closed doors, giving the public full view of the situation — had lost the case, her reputation, now merely tainted by groundless allegations, would have been destroyed, and her career as an educator would have been crippled, if not ended.

She “won” this case — so why does it naggingly feel like there are no losers here?

Certainly, the School Board and the superintendent, Michael Rodgers, would like to quickly put this entire escapade in the rear-view mirror. But let’s pause for more than a moment to take stock.

This is a school district in deep peril. The hearing uncovered a startling stage play full of paranoid and vindictive behavior. It suggests a fiefdom where rumor and innuendo is put to good use in punishing people who fall into disfavor. When the district was given the chance to rectify the situation through due process, the hearing officer, Timothy Taylor, instead found an administrator — interim Superintendent Richard Loeschner, who took up the cause at the behest of Rodgers, then a physical education teacher, now the superintendent — who launched a “biased” investigation based on all sorts of nonsense.

Dorr is back on the job — but those people all kept theirs. Considering the auto-da-fé they put her through, the remarkable escalation over a single red envelope, no different from a dozen or more circulating in the administrative offices that Christmas season, that doesn’t seem like justice in the end.

It’s difficult to imagine that this was an isolated incident — a school community merely concerned that a gift card meant for someone else was palmed by the school’s principal. This was over-the-top persecution. Common sense is that it was related to something larger, and that Maria Dorr was only the most visible victim of this kind of retribution, because she took her fight public. How many other “judgments” were quietly handed out because the victims didn’t want the publicity, the scorn?

The School Board, meanwhile, has shrunk into a silent corner, suggesting that a “commitment to personal privacy” will be enough of a justification for never explaining how such a thing could happen on its watch, or what lessons were learned, if any.

So, in the end, you have a principal who was raked over the coals for months, accused of risking her veteran career in education over a fill-up or an overnight delivery of a cheap Bluetooth speaker, who gets to walk back into the lion’s den. How long before there’s some other manufactured reason to dismiss her?

And to the School Board members: If you have administrators who are unable to conduct a fair investigation into such a trivial matter, doesn’t that suggest there is a leadership issue well beyond the mail room and a couple of red envelopes?

The Wall Street Journal and the Guardian have moved on — their readers entertained by the kerfuffle in the tiny district in the “tony Hamptons” — but we who remain have to say it: To anyone who truly paid attention, there is evidence of a deep rot in this school district, and that should be of concern to every member of the School Board. And if the School Board isn’t concerned, that should be a source of distress for parents and taxpayers.

Any court proceeding, even a quasi-judicial one in a tiny school district on the South Fork, has a winner and a loser. There have to be consequences for both. It’s hard to shake the notion that there are still consequences to come, but they won’t be paid by the side that lost. That’s going to be a lot more costly than a $50 gift card in some standard red envelope.