Class Warfare

But although Tollin might have been fed up, she never, it turns out, threw a blind child into a locker. “There’s not even a blind child at Baldwin!” says Michael Pouls’s source when I get her on the phone. She doesn’t want to be named, and is disturbed that her story has been exaggerated. “There aren’t even lockers in that hallway! All I said was, Patsy Tollin seemed a little bit tougher than maybe she needed to be.”

And there’s no doubt about the fact that Mrs. Tollin was loved by many parents and students. In the months after her firing, she worked a successful public relations campaign in the community, and letters extolling her virtues arrived at Baldwin by the ton. One parent’s strangely odic letter read:

Patsy is structured but flexible.
Patsy is disciplined but fair.
Patsy knows each child’s strengths, both academically and socially.
Patsy has a sense of humor and truly enjoys children.
Patsy is a Master Teacher and one of Baldwin’s treasures. …

Meanwhile, Mark Halpern was discussing a tentative settlement with Baldwin and the Poulses’ lawyers. But when Halpern heard a rumor that Michael Pouls was saying, of the money his lawyer was offering, “That’s less than I paid for my pool furniture,” his blood boiled. He upped the ante: $1 million from the school and the Poulses.

Baldwin and the Poulses declined the settlement offer. “I told Mark Halpern his client was being piggish,” their lawyer, Stephen Hankin, says. “And you know what happens to pigs? Pigs get slaughtered.”

The following Monday, Patsy Tollin filed her lawsuit.


LIKE THE BALDWIN administrators, the Poulses claim they weren’t the reason Patsy Tollin’s contract wasn’t renewed.

“God can trace me down, I have never said to the school, ‘Fire the teacher or I am pulling my money out,’” says Michael Pouls, pointing a finger at the vaulted ceiling of his office, as if God himself is lingering directly outside the Poulses’ house, waiting to hear the true story.

“When I was angry, I might have said something that could have inflicted that,” explains Sheryl Pouls nervously. “But never had I said that to anyone.”

After the Inquirer coverage of the lawsuit and the subsequent dissemination of the story on the Internet, the Poulses hired a PR man to sell their side of the story, and one weekday in June, Michael, Sheryl and I talked in the cool comfort of their ginormous gated Gladwyne mansion. “I don’t want this story to be about the house,” the PR man had warned in the circular driveway, in the middle of which sits a burbling fountain.

Michael and Sheryl Pouls grew up in Cherry Hill — “where all of the eggs of nouveau riche are hatched,” one Main Line mom sniffs — and their house is of the Opulent School, with dark wood and marble and large flower arrangements on a Tuesday.

---