Board upholds firing teacher with asthma who took leave

She took extended leave due to COVID-19 health concerns

The Ellington Board of Education voted Tuesday evening to uphold the firing of a teacher with severe asthma who took extended leaves during the school year due to health concerns about contracting COVID-19 at work. But the educator is considering appealing the decision, her lawyer said Wednesday.

“We haven’t decided on that yet, but I would say it’s likely,” said Andrew Houlding of Updike, Kelly & Spellacy, P.C., noting the case would next go to Superior Court.

Public hearings on Windermere School teacher Maura Klesczewski’s firing started in early May, after she exercised her right to the sessions under the Teacher Tenure Act. Over the next month, the board met multiple times to hear cases made by both the school district and Klesczewski about whether or not she should be able to keep her job.

After hours of deliberation, board members announced their decision in a 6-4vote Tuesday, Houlding confirmed.

“We lost by one vote. ... If it had gone 5-5, the motion would not have carried,” he added.

The monthslong backand-forth over Klesczewski’s employment began in July, when the teacher of more than 20 years submitted a doctor’s note asking to limit her physical contact with others because of her asthma, according a termination notice from the school district. While the note did not qualify her for disability accommodations, she was placed on a list of teachers providing online instruction from empty classrooms, Superintendent of Schools Scott Nicol said in the termination notice.

However, she decided to submit Family and Medical Leave Act documents to the district in mid-September because technical issues with remote learning required her to have close contact with other staff members, Houlding said. The district approved her request for protected, unpaid leave through Dec. 23. When that ran out, she continued to remain out through February on paid sick leave that she’d previously accrued.

Then, in late February, Klesczewski requested unpaid leave for the rest of the school year and to return the following school year, once she was fully vaccinated. In the termination notice, Nicol wrote that he denied her request and stated she was to return to work by March15, resign or the board of education would begin the process to consider her termination.

At the end of March, after “extensive discussions” with Klesczewski and union representatives, the superintendent said in the termination notice that she agreed to a release and settlement agreement with the school district that included her resignation, in exchange for the board providing unpaid leave for the rest of the 20202021 school year and stopping the termination process. But then she rescinded her signature within an allowed seven-day time period to discuss the agreement further with her attorney.

Houlding noted that what she signed was not a letter of resignation, but rather an agreement that she would sign a letter of resignation.

When the school district warned Klesczewski April 1 that the termination process would resume if she didn’t implement the agreement by April 6, she and her lawyer proposed she return to the classroom mid-April, when her vaccine would be fully effective.

Then, on April 6, the teacher’s doctor complied with her request to reauthorize her return to work that same day “since it appeared that she would be substantially protected by the vaccine even if it had not reached full effectiveness,” Houlding wrote in a letter to the board.

Frederick Dorsey of Kainen, Escalera & McHale, P.C., the board of education’s attorney, told the Courant in May: “She was never available to come to work, and all of her doctor’s notes said she couldn’t come to work until next school year. Only when she was told that she was going to receive the [termination] letter from the superintendent ... she suddenly came in the next day with a note saying, ‘Oh yes I can work now.’ “

“All the other documentation leading up to the decision to terminate was based on different things her doctor said, but now they weren’t true because her job was on the line,” he added.

Dorsey and the superintendent’s office did not immediately reply to requests for comment Wednesday afternoon.

In the termination notice, Nicol said Klesczewski was excessively absent from work, had exhausted all of her paid and unpaid leave and had requested unpaid leave that meant her absence would “continue through the end of the 2020-21 school year and indefinitely thereafter.”

“In any one or all the above, you have failed to comply with the minimal acceptable standards of the Ellington Boardof Education ... for continued employment in the [Ellington School] System,” he wrote, stating the school system must “act now in the best interests of the System’s students to fill your position.”

If Klesczewski does decide to move forward with the appeal, Houlding said they would have to wait until the board publishes its decision in writing, which he expects to happen over the next few days. He plans to continue arguing that the district did not “engage in a meaningful, interactive dialogue” with Klesczewski “over the fact that she has a disability within the meanings of the Americans with Disabilities Act,” which is required by federal law.

According to a final ruling from the U.S. Department of Justice that went into effect in 2016, “an impairment that is episodic or in remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active ,” including asthma.

“The fact that the periods during which an episodic impairment is active and substantially limits a major life activity may be brief or occur infrequently is no longer relevant to determining whether the impairment substantially limits a major life activity,” the department noted.