Fired Bellport principal says he will sue
Former South Country Central School principal Kevin O'Connell. (Dec. 13, 2011) Credit: Newsday/Danielle Finkelstein
The fired Bellport High School principal who accused the district's superintendent of pushing to boost a star athlete's grades said Tuesday he will file a wrongful-termination lawsuit in state court.
Kevin O'Connell, of East Patchogue, said he was let go at the end of the last school year after he did not force a math teacher to change Ryan Sloan's marks so the football player could meet NCAA standards.
O'Connell, at a news conference Tuesday in Garden City with his attorney, Jack Grossman, said he will name South Country Central School District Superintendent Joe Cipp Jr. and several other school administrators as defendants in the suit. He said the lawsuit will be filed in two weeks in State Supreme Court in Suffolk County and will seek $1 million in damages.
Asked by a reporter if Cipp told him to make the grade change, O'Connell said the superintendent did not. He said only that Cipp was insistent that the player needed a specific score to qualify for admission to Syracuse University.
"And that's where the comments stopped," O'Connell said.
Cipp, who is South Country's former veteran football coach, has strongly denied O'Connell's accusations, saying he never has changed a player's grades or asked anyone else to do so.
Sloan, now a Syracuse freshman and member of its football team, also has repeatedly denied O'Connell's claims. Sloan and his guardians both said he worked hard to raise his grades.
Greg Guercio, an attorney representing the school district, said late Tuesday that O'Connell, who was on a one-year probationary term as principal, was let go for "appropriate reasons." He would not elaborate on why the district did not ask O'Connell back for a second year of service. Guercio said he would not comment on O'Connell's grade-changing claims, pending the outcome of the district's own investigation.
South Country hired an outside agency to do that probe. Melville attorney Bronwyn Black, backed by computer and educational experts familiar with the district's computerized grading system, started the investigation Monday. Black, a former prosecuting attorney, worked previously for the district on a personnel case, Guercio said.
O'Connell now is an administrator in the Roosevelt Union Free School District. In earlier interviews with Newsday, he said he was asking South Country to pay him $51,000 in lost wages.
The district denied the request, saying the firing had merit.
O'Connell also said in an earlier interview that he did not plan to take legal action against the district. At Tuesday's news conference, he said Newsday and another newspaper were wrong in reporting that he did not intend to take the issue to court.
In making public his claims, O'Connell gave Sloan's transcript and report card to the media, including Newsday.
Tom Dunn, a state Department of Education spokesman, said Tuesday that federal law -- the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, or FERPA -- prohibits school officials from divulging a student's records without parental permission.
"We are aware of the allegations," Dunn, in an emailed statement, said regarding O'Connell's claims. "We are, however, prohibited from commenting on complaints and investigations -- even to confirm whether a complaint has been received or an investigation is being undertaken by the department."
With John Hildebrand
