Acting upon the recommendation of Superintendent Greg Johnson, the Oak Park and River Forest High School District 200 Board of Education voted 6-0 with one abstention to fire veteran physics teacher Aaron Podolner during a special meeting on July 10.
Podolner had been suspended on paid leave since late November after a female student accused him of inappropriately touching her. The allegation was referred to the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services. In January a DCFS investigation concluded that the allegation was unfounded.
“I’m disappointed today because both DCFS and the Oak Park police investigated the allegation and determined it was unfounded,” Podolner said Friday in an email following the board’s vote. “I will be appealing the board’s decision.”
Podolner declined to comment further on the advice of his lawyer, noted education attorney Steve Glink.
A statement from Oak Park spokesman Dan Yopchick indicated the case is closed with no charges filed.
“All parties were interviewed by OPPD detectives and DCFS,” Yopchick said Friday in an email. “Nothing was found to substantiate the allegations.”
Glink said Podolner was accused of touching a student’s buttocks, and that DCFS’s standard of proof is any credible evidence.
“If it’s unfounded that means they found no credible evidence, so how I interpret that as a lawyer is that they didn’t find the girl to be credible,” Glink said. “Also there were three other students there, not one of them saw it.”
Glink said he would file an appeal of Podolner’s dismissal to the Illinois State Board of Education, which will appoint a hearing officer and conduct an evidentiary hearing. After the hearing the hearing officer will make a recommendation to the OPRF School Board, which will then have a chance to review its decision to fire Podolner. If the board confirms its decision to fire Podolner, he will then have the right to appeal the firing in court.
“I understand why the board fired him because politically they don’t have a choice,” Glink said. “If a student comes in there and says a teacher groped me and they don’t fire him you know where that goes, so I think they did what they felt they had to do.”
The decision to fire Podolner was handed down after a marathon 2 hour and 10 minute closed session that was mostly devoted to discussing the Podolner situation. Podolner appeared before the board during the initial part of the closed session. Also inside the board room with the School Board members and Johnson was the board’s lawyer and Janel Bishop, the school’s director of employee relations and recruitment.
After returning to open session, the board quickly voted to fire Podolner without discussion. Board member Josh Gertz abstained from the vote to fire Podolner, saying that he wanted to give Podolner more time to respond to the allegations.
“We deliberated very intensely,” Gertz said.
After the meeting OPRF District 200 Superintendent Greg Johnson declined to elaborate on why he recommended firing Podolner.
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“These are always really hard decisions, and other than that I have nothing to add,” Johnson said.
School Board members mostly declined to comment on the record about the firing.
“As you know the board does not discuss personnel matters outside of our closed meeting sessions,” said board President Audrey Williams-Lee in an email.
Podolner grew up in Oak Park and graduated from OPRF in 1996. He has taught at OPRF since graduating from Kalamazoo College in 2000 and was awarded the prestigious Golden Apple award for outstanding teaching in 2004. Podolner appeared in the 2018 documentary “America to Me” which was about race relations at the school.
Podolner was the subject of some discussion about “America to Me,” including a story in the Hollywood Reporter and an episode recap in Chicago Magazine. In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter Podolner said that while watching the documentary he saw himself “making mistakes.”
Until he was suspended in November, Podolner was the faculty sponsor of the OPRF Jewish Student Connection Club and worked with former OPRF teacher Jessica Stovall, who was also featured in “America to Me,” in an effort to form a discussion group about racial equity at the school.
Bob Skolnik is a freelance reporter for Pioneer Press.