The resignation letter that Middlebury Union High School principal Justin Campbell sent to the school community was brief and boilerplate.

“After much contemplation, many conversations with family, and some deep introspection, I have decided to resign my position,” Campbell wrote in his January 23 email. “It has been a deep honor to be part of the MUHS community and I will cherish the memories I’ve made.”

For many students, parents and staff, the news came as a jolt. Campbell, halfway through his third year on the job, was an affable and well-respected administrator who greeted students at the front door every morning and knew most by name. Before coming to Middlebury, he had served as principal of Hanover High School in New Hampshire for eight years.

But one person wasn’t surprised by the principal’s announcement. Just two hours before Campbell made public his resignation, Jill Dunn — a former tennis coach at the high school where her sons graduated — had received an email from Addison Central School District’s lawyer bearing news of a very different nature.

The attorney reported that a school district investigation had substantiated Dunn’s claims that Campbell had fabricated student interviews he supposedly conducted as part of an investigation into teen drinking at a prom-night party at Dunn’s home 18 months earlier.

The news was a stunning conclusion to Dunn’s monthslong crusade to contest Campbell’s 2021 decision to fire her and her husband, Pat, the boys’ varsity basketball assistant coach. If not for her tenacity, Campbell’s fabrications may never have come to light.

While the Dunns ultimately failed to win back their coaching positions, no one could have anticipated the lengths to which they would go to press their case, including hiring a private investigator who unearthed the truth around the principal’s actions.

Campbell did not respond to multiple attempts by Seven Days to speak with him. But through interviews and a review of documents, internal emails and recorded conversations, Seven Days was able to piece together what happened — and how Campbell nearly got away with it.

A brewing conflict

The chain of events that led to Campbell’s resignation began more than a year earlier. In late August 2021, Campbell emailed the Dunns asking to meet with them. He wanted to discuss reports from “a few community members” about “an underage party where drinking occurred” at the Dunns’ residence in June.

Dunn believed the party — a post-prom gathering for her son, then a senior, and his classmates — had gone off without a hitch, so she and her husband were perplexed. Still, on September 8, the Dunns met with Campbell and then-assistant principal Cathy Dieman and related their version of events: She and Pat had grilled hot dogs, served snacks and nonalcoholic beverages, and allowed teens to use their ping-pong table, pool and hot tub, and to camp out on their lawn.

Jill Dunn told Campbell that she and her husband didn’t provide alcohol or see any drunken behavior. But she acknowledged that teens might have been drinking at the party and that her son had also told her that students had been drinking during prom. Campbell thanked the couple for coming in, Dunn said, and she assumed that was the end of the matter.

Later that fall, she emailed Campbell with complaints about the school’s activities director, Sean Farrell. Dunn had served as the girls’ varsity tennis coach since 2018, and her sons were high school athletes. She had clashed with Farrell before: once when she discovered she was being paid less than other varsity coaches and another time over the accounting from a bake sale fundraiser held at a school concession stand. This time, she told Campbell, Farrell was ignoring her requests to be part of an athletic leadership group. Campbell agreed to meet about her grievances. (Farrell declined to comment on his disagreements with Dunn).

But when the Dunns next met with Campbell and Dieman in late November, Campbell focused on the post-prom party. He told the couple he had completed his “investigation” of the event, Dunn told Seven Days, and had determined that the Dunns had known underage students were drinking.

As a result, Jill and Pat were being fired from their coaching jobs, he told them.

The Dunns were stunned. They had not even known Campbell was investigating the party.

The couple left Campbell’s office, Jill Dunn slamming the door behind her. As his wife cried, Pat called the head basketball coach to tell him he wouldn’t be at tryouts that evening.

A formal complaint

The Dunns suspected that there might have been other motives for their dismissal — perhaps Jill Dunn’s past conflicts with Farrell. So Dunn asked Campbell to see the district’s investigatory notes.

In January 2022, she recorded a meeting with Campbell, in which he told the Dunns he had interviewed three students who had attended the party. He told them he could share redacted investigatory notes, though Jill Dunn said those were never provided. Campbell also told them he would look into her complaints against Farrell.

Asked whether the Dunns might be reinstated as coaches, Campbell’s tone was conciliatory. He said it was “absolutely” possible the two could return to coaching or volunteering at the school. But that didn’t happen.

At a second meeting in February, Campbell said the school board and the superintendent first would need “to feel like our kids are in a good place with you as coaches.”

“I don’t want to give you false hope,” he said on an audio recording of the meeting.

Finally, in May, the Dunns took their case to superintendent Peter Burrows and assistant superintendent Caitlin Steele. Dunn also recorded that meeting. Among other things, the Dunns told the administrators they thought Campbell might be lying about who he had talked with when looking into her complaints about Farrell.

“I’m starting to get a sense of, like, he’s not being honest with us,” Dunn told Burrows. The superintendent said little, telling them he was just there to listen.

By then, Dunn had already decided to look for an outside resolution — by filing a formal complaint of sex-based employment discrimination and retaliation against the Addison Central School District. In a complaint to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in June 2022, she described her grievances against Farrell and what she considered the absence of due process when she and her husband were fired.

‘Worse than I ever thought’

In August 2022, as Jill waited to hear from the school district regarding her future as a coach and from the EEOC regarding its investigation, she emailed both Farrell and Campbell asking if she could volunteer with the high school’s junior varsity volleyball team. She received an email from the superintendent.

“Based on the findings made in connection with your investigation, we decline to accept your offer to volunteer,” Burrows wrote.

In October, the Dunns were dealt another setback when the EEOC closed its investigation into Jill Dunn’s allegations against the district.

“Evidence shows you were dismissed because you hosted a party where minors consumed alcohol in your present (sic), but you did nothing to stop it,” the EEOC stated in a letter.

Dunn wanted to see the evidence, so she logged into her case file through the EEOC’s online portal and found a document sent by the school district’s lawyer.

The lawyer’s letter said the district’s “investigator” had not retained his notes of interviews about the Dunn’s post-prom party. But attached to the letter were four typed interview summaries, prepared by principal Campbell. One interview summary documented the meeting Campbell had with the Dunns in September 2021. The other interviews were with three young women who had attended the post-prom party. The interviews — allegedly conducted on September 9, September 10 and October 29, 2021 — contained similar descriptions of a gathering in which beer was being consumed in plain sight of Jill and Pat Dunn.

Jill Dunn didn’t recognize the women’s names, so she called her son to ask who they were. He told her it didn’t make sense to him that these particular students would have complained. He texted the women photographs of the statements that had been attributed to them. All three told Dunn’s son that Campbell had not interviewed them.

“Oh my gosh, this is worse than I ever thought,” Dunn remembered thinking.

Determined to learn the truth, Dunn spent $1,500 in November 2022 to hire a private investigation agency that would obtain statements from the three young women, now in college.

Later that month, Privin Consulting Network sent the Dunns its report. Two of the women told the private investigator that they had never met with Campbell or any other school staff to discuss the party. The third young woman said she was at school on October 29 for a different matter and that Farrell had approached her in the hall and asked her questions about the party. But she said she did not sit down with Campbell and Farrell, as Campbell’s interview summary had specified.

(In an April 19 email to Seven Days, Farrell disagreed with that account, writing that he “did approach [the student] asking if she would be willing to meet with me and Mr. Campbell to discuss her experience at the party and she agreed. Mr. Campbell was in my office during the entire interview process.”)

Armed with evidence that at least two student interviews had been entirely fabricated, the Dunns were ready to share their findings with the school district.

‘Substantiated’

At first, their attempts were rebuffed.

In early December, Dunn wrote a lengthy email to superintendent Burrows, assistant superintendent Steele and principal Campbell.

“We have learned that (the young women) were all used as witnesses without their awareness and that these meetings never occurred!” she wrote. “Their statements contain fabricated information which could only have come from the administration.”

But superintendent Burrows stood behind Campbell. “We consider the matter concluded,” he wrote.

Dunn did not give up. In January, she emailed school board members, again sounding the alarm.

“After nearly a year of meetings and an investigation by the EEOC this fall, we have discovered that the evidence Dr. Burrows provided to the EEOC was fabricated. Absolutely made up,” she wrote.

Then-school board chair Victoria Jette replied that the board believed “the matter has been handled appropriately” and told Dunn to direct any further communication to the district’s attorney.

But Dunn ignored Jette’s directive and emailed school board members again the following day, pointing out that the school board’s role was to hold the administration accountable.

“This is ‘dirty cop’ behavior (making up evidence),” she wrote. This time, she attached the private investigator’s report to her email.

Dunn didn’t hear from the school board again.

But the private investigator’s findings had “alarmed” the superintendent and school board, the district acknowledged in a statement to Seven Days this month.

On January 13, the school district’s lawyer, Pietro Lynn, emailed Dunn to say he had seen the private investigator’s report.

“We take the allegations raised very seriously,” he wrote. “We are investigating the issue.”

Ten days later, he emailed again.

“The District has completed its investigation. It substantiated your allegations about the student interviews,” Lynn wrote. “We appreciate that you brought this to our attention. We cannot discuss how we have dealt with the issue internally.”

Roughly two hours later, Campbell resigned.

The aftermath

As soon as the school district substantiated Dunn’s allegations, Lynn told Seven Days, the board and superintendent “were prepared to take appropriate disciplinary action,” but Campbell resigned before they could do so.

School district officials reported their findings about Campbell to the state Agency of Education, as required when there is evidence of unprofessional conduct by an educator. Dunn also contacted the agency and was interviewed by its investigator in March, she said.

Lynn said he also notified the EEOC that the district had discovered that the information it provided to the federal agency months before wasn’t accurate.

The Agency of Education investigator, Bob Stafford, told Seven Days he could not confirm pending investigations. Consequences for those who are found to have behaved unprofessionally vary widely, he said, from anger management classes to restorative actions to voluntary surrender or revocation of a license. Often, they are governed by strict confidentiality rules.

As a result, the Dunns, and the public, may never learn what consequences, if any, Campbell would face.

In late January, the school district decided to reopen its investigations into both the post-prom party and Dunn’s allegations of “discrimination and unprofessional conduct” against Farrell, the district wrote in a statement to Seven Days.

“Ms. Dunn and her husband were invited and refused to cooperate with either investigation,” the district’s statement said. That meant that the investigator — Addison Central director of equity and student services Nicole Carter — “completed the renewed investigations with the information available.”

Last month, the district concluded for the second time that the Dunns had been aware of teen drinking at the post-prom party. It is not clear what evidence led to that conclusion, as Lynn, the district’s lawyer, declined to elaborate. Thus, the Dunns’ firing stood. In addition, the investigation did not substantiate the couples’ claims of discrimination and unprofessional conduct by district employees, the school district’s statement to Seven Days said.

The board and superintendent are confident that they have fulfilled their commitment to “honesty and integrity, enforcement of the District’s policies and transparency, where possible,” the district’s statement said.

The Dunns have a different assessment.

They said they declined to cooperate with the school district’s reinvestigations because they had already told their story to district administrators on multiple occasions. They also believed they should have been able to tell their story directly to the school board but said they were blocked by district administrators and lawyers.

Dunn wonders why she and her husband have not received an apology from the district for Campbell’s actions or for administrators’ initial unwillingness to heed their warnings. Nor had the district acknowledged publicly, until now, that the high school principal fabricated witness statements in an investigation.

In the meantime, the 2023 girls’ tennis season is under way, with two male high school employees as coaches. In the fall, superintendent Burrows will start a job as superintendent of Milton, Mass., public schools. Former assistant superintendent Caitlin Steele was named Middlebury Union High School principal last month. Campbell did not answer the door at his home nor did he respond to a letter this reporter left there.

Pat Dunn is starting his third term year as a Salisbury Selectboard member and road commissioner. Jill Dunn still volunteers as an assistant coach with Middlebury College’s girls’ volleyball team. She said she’s hopeful that she’ll be able to coach high school tennis again one day.

]]>