Teacher Jessica Fournier threatened to sue us for $500,000

Yes, you read the title right.  In 2012, our son’s special-education teacher threatened to sue us (we’re Jane & Matt) for $500,000. That teacher was Jessica Cuff Fournier, who was then at Mt. Ararat Middle School and who is now a “behavior strategist” (whatever that is) at Bowdoinham Community School.  

What, you may ask, did we do that was half-a-million-dollars bad?  We’re not exactly sure (keep reading), but we think it was mostly because we tried to get her removed as our son’s special-education teacher.

You see, we had issues with Ms. Fournier from the first day she took over as our son’s teacher at the beginning of the 2010-11 school year.  We complained about her, but the district continually defended her and never took our complaints seriously.  The many complaints that we had will be detailed in later posts, but one of them, in February 2012, was a written formal request to the district, on its own form and following its own procedures, called a “Classroom Reassignment Request,” to request that Ms. Fournier be removed as our son’s teacher.

Fast forward to August 2012.  We received a notice of claim from Ms. Fournier on the letterhead of the law firm of Moncure & Barnicle in Topsham.  The notice said that we “should contact John Richardson from that law firm” about the notice.

The notice said that Ms. Fournier was making claims against us for defamation; negligent and/or intentional infliction of emotional distress; and interference with contractual relations.  But it provided no details about what we did that formed the basis of these claims.

We sent the notice to our homeowners’ insurance company, Patrons Oxford.  An adjuster there contacted John Richardson, like the notice said to do.  But he could not give the adjuster any details about Ms. Fournier’s claims.  He couldn’t give the adjuster the dates that we allegedly did anything wrong.  He couldn’t tell the adjuster what false statements supported the defamation claim.  He couldn’t tell the adjuster what we did that was “so extreme and outrageous as to exceed all possible bounds of decency and [that] must be regarded as atrocious, utterly intolerable in a civilized community” to support the claim of intentional infliction of emotional distress.  He did not explain when we may have killed someone that Ms. Fournier was with, or how we had some special relationship to Ms. Fournier, in order to support a claim for negligent infliction of emotional distress.  He didn’t explain what severe emotional distress Ms. Fournier suffered from our complaints about her.  And he did not explain how, given that Ms. Fournier was granted tenure in the spring of 2012, there was any “interference” with her teaching contract to support her claim for interference with contractual relations.

Attorney Richardson told our insurance adjuster to ask us about his claims on behalf of Ms. Fournier.  The adjuster replied, entirely correctly, that the claims were made by Ms. Fournier and that only Ms. Fournier (or Attorney Richardson, on her behalf) could say what they were based on.

We later found out  that Ms. Fournier had not even read our classroom reassignment request when she sent us the notice of claim.  In other words, she had not read our most detailed complaints about her before threatening to sue us for those complaints.  We figure that she was going either by the District’s attorneys’ comments that she had a claim against us (although everyone denies that she ever saw the letters saying that she had a claim, she admitted seeing at least one letter from the district’s attorneys to us), or by the comment that Patrick Moore, the district’s then-special services director, made to her–that our classroom reassignment complaint was “slanderous.’

Ms. Fournier later testified that her notice of claim was “a preemptive move to just say I’m serious, please stop. . . . I don’t want to sue you.  I just want you to stop.”  She earlier had said that we were trying to get her fired, so we assume that that’s what she wanted us to stop.  We hadn’t actually done anything to try to get her fired–we had only asked that she be removed as our son’s teacher.  Matt did attend the board hearing where she was granted tenure, but he did not speak in opposition to her tenure (and did not speak at all, for that matter).  

Ms. Fournier did never did sue us, although she did later try–unsuccessfully–to get a protection-from-harassment order against Jane.

So, parents, think carefully before complaining about a teacher.  You might end up on the wrong end of a half-million-dollar lawsuit, or at least a threat of one.