Class Warfare

ON A HOT AFTERNOON IN July, Patricia “Patsy” Tollin, a former teacher at the prestigious Baldwin School and the plaintiff in a lawsuit that has had the Main Line talking all summer, is sitting in her lawyer’s Bala Cynwyd office, describing an incident in which she says Sheryl Pouls, the parent of one of Tollin’s former second-grade students, showed off a pair of surgically altered breasts in a Baldwin School classroom as Tollin and another parent looked on. “She opened her shirt and said, ‘Look how small they are!’” says Tollin, pursing her lips in the manner of a schoolmarm, which is what she is. “I couldn’t tell.”

Sheryl Pouls emphatically denies the incident ever took place. “I would never have done that,” she says several weeks later. “I didn’t even have plastic surgery.” She adds that Tollin’s charge raises suspicion because it is one the teacher didn’t make in her original complaint.

The back-and-forth is just one of the many sensational tales in what is shaping up to be a particularly seamy battle between the teacher and the Poulses — Sheryl and her husband Michael, a wealthy real estate developer from Gladwyne-by-way-of-New-Jersey — who Tollin claims were responsible for the loss of her job. The luridly detailed lawsuit the teacher filed this past June against Baldwin and the Pouls family includes charges that Sheryl Pouls missed a parent-teacher conference because of the aforementioned cosmetic-surgery procedure, paints Michael Pouls as a control freak who described himself as his children’s “main caregiver,” and, most importantly, accuses the Poulses of leveraging a multimillion-dollar donation they made to the school in order to get her fired, since their seven-year-old daughter, Amanda, had complained that Tollin “yelled a lot” in class last year. Both Baldwin and the Poulses deny they had anything to do with the loss of Tollin’s job, and for their part, the Poulses deny all of the allegations. In fact, they claim it was Tollin who was abusive, and that their daughter was one of many children terrorized by the teacher during her 22-year career.

The drama has made the Baldwin Battle the most riveting Main Line scandal since, well, Susan Tabas Tepper chucked a bag of carrots at her nanny last year. In fact, according to Tollin, the Poulses made the Royal Bank heiress, who was convicted earlier this year of mistreating her staff, look like a regular Donna Reed.

“I had Susan Tabas Tepper’s daughter in the same class,” Tollin says. “Susan was warm, she read to the children, brought them treats.” She shrugs. “She was a delight.”

WORD OF THE TOLLIN/POULS CONFLICT STARTED TO spread at the end of the last school year, when parents of ­second-graders at the school began receiving letters from the Baldwin administration hinting at trouble. This morning there was an exchange in the hallway between a parent and a second-grade teacher that was inappropriate. … From time to time events occur that lead some, without knowing all the circumstances surrounding a particular event, to conclude that donors to our school might be treated differently than others. … And finally, a note from Tollin herself: I would like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your continued support during what has turned out to be an “ugly” year for me.