The state’s highest court yesterday declined to overturn an arbitrator’s decision that a teacher should receive only a 90-day suspension without pay and be moved from Staten Island’s New Dorp High School for engaging in 2005 in an “inappropriate communication of an intimate nature” with a 15-year-old student in her honors English course.
“That reasonable minds might disagree over what the proper penalty should have been does not provide a basis for vacating the arbitral award or refashioning the penalty,” a unanimous Court of Appeals ruled in City School District v. McGraham, 193.
