Lawsuit: Teachers Filling Cult With Students in Connecticut?
Three teachers in Avon, Connecticut, and a guidance counselor are named as defendants in a lawsuit brought by the parents of three daughters who claim to have been inducted by their mentors at Avon High School (above) into a cult.
Teachers Tanya Mastoloni, Christopher Esposito and Rebecca Kessler, and guidance counselor Laura Sullivan are individually named in the suit (provided in full below), as well as Avon Public Schools and Wellesley College.
The lawsuit alleges “predatory religious indoctrination… inflicted” on numerous male and female students by the four named defendants, who “have actively concealed” this cult indoctrination from students’ parents.
The plaintiffs are merely named as John and Jane Doe, parents of three daughters allegedly recruited into the cult, even into college, where they say college officials were negligent in allowing the relationships with the teachers to continue for two of their daughters.
The three teachers, reportedly known as a group as “Tri-State”, since one each was born in Connecticut, New York and New Jersey, allegedly sought conversion of numerous female students who they felt were good candidates for initiation into a supposedly Latin-slanted cult, a rite known as martyrdom.
Those they didn’t like, the suit alleges, “they would ostracize and alienate that student,” but those they coveted were pointed toward the coven: “They would make that student feel like he or she was part of their group.”
The suit goes deeper. Mastoloni and her peers taught:
“… students religion and pseudoscience. Specifically, she taught her students to believe in superstition, magic, and a non-scientific, anti-intellectual worldview. She would discuss spirituality, numerology, astrology, dreams, mysticism, looking for ‘signs,’ angels, symbols, ‘synchronicity,’ ‘negativity,’ ‘seeking the truth’ and death. All of those topics are religious in nature, and none of those topics are included in the Avon School District curriculum.”
Nor do they exist in the average Spanish teacher’s syllabus, but that’s the job Mastoloni was supposed to be teaching.
The district was tight-lipped in receipt of the judicial complaint. “The district administration is in receipt of the complaint filed recently in federal court and is reviewing it at this time,” district officials stated in a release. “No communications regarding that which is alleged in the complaint have been received in the past. We will continue to review the content of the complaint and have turned the matter over to our school district legal counsel.”
More is still to be known about whether the cult was more like a Dead Poets’ Society than a Waco recluse camp. At least things don’t appear to be as bad as a Florida education official, Republican representative Charles Van Zant, recently described. Van Zant just alleged that Florida’s current Common Core standards are turning tomorrow’s leaders “as homosexual as they possibly can” be.
Here’s the full transcript of the Connecticut lawsuit:
[Image courtesy of WikiMedia]
