A Staten Island teacher who had a crush on a 15-year-old student she bombarded with e-mails and instant messages shouldn’t be fired, a state appeals court said.
In a ruling made public yesterday, the state Appellate Division found that an arbitrator’s decision to suspend Colleen McGraham for 90 days instead of canning her wasn’t overly lenient, despite the “intimate” e-mails she sent the teen and the numerous blog postings she had penned about her fantasies.
According to the 3-2 appellate ruling, Graham showed remorse and entered therapy after investigators confronted her.
“The hearing officer had a strong basis for concluding that respondent could be trusted once again to teach students,” the ruling said.
In a scathing dissent, Justice Rolando Acosta said the ruling was “irrational” and “disconnected from the strong public policy of protecting children from improper conduct by those entrusted to educate and guard them.”
McGraham was a 36-year-old tenured teacher at New Dorp HS when she engaged in the creepy conduct in 2005, court papers say.
She became close to the student, identified in court documents as “MS,” when acting as an adviser for his theater club and a poetry project and, according to McGraham, they would e-mail each other and flirt.
She also lent him her copy of the movie “Harold and Maude,” about a romance between an elderly woman and a teen.
McGraham told him she thought “the lines in their relationship were getting blurred,” but MS told her “he did not have those types of feelings for her,” court papers say.
McGraham wrote numerous blog entries about her feelings for MS and frustrations over their “relationship,” the city said in court papers.
When an arbitrator recommended only a suspension, noting that nothing physical took place, the city went to court to try for a harsher penalty.
The city said it plans to appeal the appellate ruling, but concerns over McGraham teaching again may be moot.
She was relieved of classroom assignments while the case was pending, and knew when to fold ’em, knew when to walk and knew when to run — she quit last year to become a professional poker player.