Plainview-Old Bethpage district continues fight to fire Karen Heitner, principal accused of inappropriate touching

The Plainview-Old Bethpage district will continue its fight to fire a principal found guilty of touching a staffer's buttocks, after a judge ruled against it earlier this month.

The district's school board voted unanimously Tuesday to approve a resolution directing its law firm, Guercio & Guercio, to appeal the decision handed down by state Supreme Court Justice Gary M. Carlton on Sept. 1.

Carlton had denied the board’s petition to fire Karen Heitner, a tenured principal at Pasadena Elementary School. He also rejected the board’s request to vacate the decision of a hearing officer who presided over Heitner’s disciplinary hearings in 2025.

State-appointed hearing officer James Brown found the principal guilty of five administrative charges but determined she should be allowed to return to work in June 2026 after a one-month unpaid suspension.

Carlton's ruling marked another setback to the district’s yearslong effort to fire the principal.

Plainview-Old Bethpage initiated administrative charges against Heitner in September 2024, alleging among other things that she had created a hostile work environment. Disciplinary hearings took place over 20 days from April through December 2025.

Superintendent Mary O'Meara said in a statement Thursday that the district was disappointed with the judge’s ruling and intends to appeal.

“We hold our administrators to high standards and expect those who lead our schools to model the District’s core values through their actions and leadership,” she said.

Heitner’s attorney Arthur Scheuermann, with the School Administrators Association of New York State, said he will oppose the district's appeal.

“We will vigorously defend Karen Heitner’s rights,” he said.

Through Scheuermann, Heitner declined to comment.

O'Meara had previously said Heitner would be administratively reassigned to the administration office when she returned to work. She said Thursday that Heitner will continue in her current administrative assignment while the appeal process moves forward.

Scheuermann said his client has appealed to the state education commissioner to be restored as a building principal. That appeal is pending.

Debate over hearing officer's decision

Carlton in his ruling wrote that the school board’s arguments largely reflected “disagreement with the hearing officer’s assessment of the evidence, his application of the petitioner’s sexual harassment policy to the facts, and the weight he assigned to the aggravating and mitigating circumstances."

But the judge noted his role was not to substitute his judgement for that of a hearing officer and an officer's order can only be vacated “on a showing of misconduct, bias, excess of power, or procedural defects.”

In one case, Brown had found Heitner guilty of touching a female employee’s buttocks at a PTA luncheon in June 2024 but did not find it constituted sexual harassment, as the district argued.

Brown said the principal should never have intentionally touched an employee and such behavior could not be condoned. But he concluded the district failed to establish that conduct was “unwelcome” within the meaning of the district’s policy, noting the staffer hugged Heitner and appeared to joke with her after the contact.

Carlton noted the staffer’s testimony that she regarded the touching as unwanted and offensive. The woman said she reacted with joking because she was in a “fight or flight” state.

However, Carlton wrote Brown is “not required to accept [the woman’s] characterization of the interaction without considering the surrounding circumstances and conflicting evidence.”

The judge said he did not conclude that “every aspect of the hearing officer’s analysis was persuasive” or that he agreed “an employee’s laughter or joking after unwanted physical contact establishes that the contact was welcome.”

But he emphasized that a hearing officer’s decision cannot be overturned just because he would have analyzed the evidence differently.

Carlton also considered the question of penalty.

Brown had found Heitner guilty of several other charges, including making a demeaning comment toward another female staffer in 2023 and discussing a third employee’s dating life after the woman had expressed disinterest.

The hearing officer credited the principal’s favorable performance evaluations and her years of service without any record of formal discipline as mitigating factors in his decision to suspend, but not fire, Heitner.

Carlton concluded that the 30-day suspension Brown issued was “not irrational or shocking to one’s sense of fairness.”

“Reasonable minds could differ as to whether a more severe penalty was warranted,” Carlton wrote. “That disagreement does not provide a basis for vacating the award or refashioning the penalty.”

Brown on Thursday declined to comment on the judge’s ruling. 

District legal costs

The case has proven costly — in time and financial resources — for Plainview-Old Bethpage.

From July 2024 through June 2026, the district was billed more than $500,000 by Guercio & Guercio, the firm representing it in the case, according to information Newsday obtained through Freedom of Information Law requests.

That figure does not account for Heitner’s pay while she was suspended from August 2024 through May 2026 or the staffing cost to cover her duties during her paid suspension. Her gross pay for 2024-25 was $206,731.

In another Nassau district, Manhasset spent three years and close to $1 million to try to fire a tenured high school theater teacher found guilty of “inappropriate physical contact” with a student, Newsday previously reported.

Similar to the unusual step Plainview-Old Bethpage took, the Manhasset school board in 2024 sought a court order to overturn an arbitrator’s decision. A different Nassau judge ruled in the district’s favor and the teacher appealed.

The conflict ended over the summer when the teacher retired and withdrew his appeal.