Class Warfare

“You’re either drunk or you’re on drugs,” Tollin told her, shutting the door. Meanwhile, children arrived at the school.

“You fucking bitch! I want you fired or I’m taking my money and my girls out of this school!”

Sheryl Pouls’s screaming drew Baiba Vasys and several parents, who pulled her away from the classroom. One child, Tollin’s complaint says, was so traumatized by the screaming that she hid in her coat locker.

One week later, Tollin was called to Powell’s office for a meeting with Powell, Vasys and a school counselor. It was the first meeting of the year that Tollin was looking forward to. After Sheryl Pouls’s outburst, she was sure the administration would see what she had been dealing with, and she expected administrators to apologize for not taking a stand against the family earlier.

Instead, she was told in the meeting that her contract would not be extended for the following year.

Tollin stood up. “I can’t listen to this bullshit anymore,” she said, and walked out, beginning to cry. The school’s counselor followed her.

“Make sure you eat dinner tonight,” Tollin remembers hearing.

“Useless,” Tollin says back in Mark Halpern’s office. “Make sure you eat dinner? What did that have to do with anything?”


THE BALDWIN SCHOOL denies that problems with the Poulses were the reason they chose not to renew Patsy Tollin’s contract.

If that’s the case, their timing was pretty lousy. In 2003, the year Samantha was in Tollin’s class, the Poulses gave a multi-million-dollar donation to the school. It was heralded in the alumni magazine, the Baldwin Echoes, as “the largest donation the school has received in its 115-year history.” With it, the school planned to kick off the construction of a long-planned athletic center. Excitement was high. The center would be the first new building on the school premises in 32 years and would give it a competitive edge on a street lined with excellent, similarly prestigious private schools.

Now, as news of Tollin’s dismissal spread throughout the community, letters began arriving at the school. “There are many grumblings of discontent,” one parent wrote to Sally Powell in March. “The incident of the outburst and the nonrenewal of Patsy Tollin’s contract are timed too closely to be unrelated. … We all perceive Mrs. Pouls as being rewarded for her outburst. Her threats to Mrs. Tollin were publicly overheard and have been fulfilled … There is no doubt in anyone’s mind that this decision was made based on endowment.”

In reality, Baldwin had had concerns about Tollin long before her interactions with the Poulses. A letter from Baldwin’s counsel to Mark Halpern listed several previous complaints about the teacher:

— March 16, 1989: Head of school Blair Stambaugh writes Miss Tollin, “I am holding your contract until June to allow you time to work on two substantive issues … shouting at the children which gives people the impression you aren’t as nurturing as they would like.”

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