Wheatley grads rally behind other suspended teacher

Noah Manskar

East Williston school district alumni are rallying to support another beloved teacher who has been suspended from the classroom.

2011 Wheatley School graduate Randi Fuchs has raised $4,200 since last Thursday to support eighth-grade science teacher Christine Perinelli, who is serving a 90-day suspension without pay after being found guilty of disciplinary charges in April.

“It’s unfortunate that it was picked apart so much to the point where she almost lost her job, and that’s why I think there’s this huge wave of help coming her way because she supported us for so long not only as a teacher, but because she’s been a parent figure,” said Fuchs, a Roslyn Heights native who lives in Boston.

Perinelli has taught at Wheatley since 1995 and has been named teacher of the year twice, her family said in a statement.

She did not teach this year after the East Williston school board suspended her with pay Sept. 2 pending the hearing, which ended with a hearing officer’s decision on April 4. She will return to the classroom in the fall.

Fuchs said she started the fundraiser on the website GoFundMe to help Perinelli recoup her withheld pay and legal expenses.

A similar effort has raised more than $10,000 for Wheatley social studies teacher Matthew Haig, who was formally charged last week with undisclosed disciplinary violations. 

Perinelli has found support from Haig’s former students and friends on Facebook, and the GoFundMe page shows Haig himself gave $100 to her fundraiser.

“They’re very upset because they know the quality of the teacher she is and she really is a doting parent in the classroom,” said Wes Berkowitz, a retired 33-year Wheatley guidance counselor who knows Perinelli and Haig personally. “She treats these children like they’re hers.”

Perinelli declined an interview request. Her husband Mike Jerchower said Fuch’s fundraiser is an “unnecessary and appreciated” effort, and that they were in the process of deciding how to best use the money.

“She was filled with emotion to think that current and past former students think or think so highly of her that they would be willing to donate their own money toward her situation, and words can’t express the gratitude and appreciation she feels because she loves her students past and present,” Jerchower said.

East Williston school Superintendent Elaine Kanas and school board President Mark Kamberg declined to comment on Perinelli’s case or the fundraiser.

The charges against Perinelli stemmed from text messages she exchanged with an eighth-grade student last year after the student’s father and school administrators asked her to stop texting him, according to the publicly available decision filed with the state Education Department.

In some of the messages, Perinelli and the student called each other pet names, such as “honey bunny” and “cutie.”

Hearing officer Robert Gray found the messages did not violate any school district texting policy but constituted an inappropriate student-teacher relationship.

Gray found Perinelli not guilty of several charges, which were redacted from the decision.

East Williston teachers and administrators, including Wheatley School principal Sean Feeney, testified to how strong a teacher Perinelli is and how well students like and respect her.

Perinelli testified that she felt she was maintaining a “nurturing relationship” with a particularly needy student in a time that was very difficult for him personally.

“Respondent’s (Perinelli’s) intentions were pure but her judgment was poor,” Gray wrote in his ruling. “Respondent’s credible testimony establishes that (she) understands she acted improperly, that (she) has learned from this situation, and that the proven misconduct is highly unlikely to recur.”

The Wheatley School’s culture of close personal relationships between teachers and students, a “source of pride” for the district known as “the Wheatley Way,” was “critical to the context of these charges,” Gray wrote.

Testimony indicated that it is not uncommon for Wheatley students to call teachers by their first names or nicknames or send them text messages containing “terms of endearment” and emojis, Gray wrote.

Cases such as Perinelli’s are generally resolved with the teacher and parent sitting down to discuss a problem, Berkowitz said, but he thinks the district has shifted away from that approach in recent years.

“This kind of issue in my tenure at Wheatley never happened, never would have happened because it stopped at the district level,” Berkowitz said. “Why this wound up going to Albany, it’s a shame. It really is.”

The decision says the student’s parents communicated directly with Perinelli last March, and Wheatley administrators discussed her communications with the student in December 2014 after his father asked that she and other teachers not text him anymore.

The charges arose after the student’s father presented administrators with text messages and phone calls last June, the decision says.

The district is considering a policy that would explicitly govern electronic communications between teachers and students.

Kamberg said the revisions have been discussed for the past two years and are not related to Perinelli’s case.

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