[B]ARRE — Burlington High School Guidance Director Mario Macias took the stand in his defense during the continuation of his Agency of Education licensing hearing Friday in Barre.
Macias was the first and only witness called by his attorney, Francisco Guzman. The hearing wrapped up Friday after three full days of testimony.
Macias is facing seven licensing charges, as the AOE is seeking a revocation of his license. A three-person panel will decide if the AOE has provided convincing evidence to revoke Macias’ license.
The agency alleges that he deliberately falsified information on a student transcript, harassed a college student who was a substitute teacher at the school, and created a hostile work environment for his coworkers.
The state also alleges he revealed personal information about a student to a third party, mismanaged oversight of a standardized test, was unaware of the basic functions of the department, and tried to persuade a student to testify in his defense.
Macias said he was surprised when he was notified that he was under AOE investigation.
“I was very surprised, I was taken aback, I was offended,” he said. “With my 20 years of experience, nothing like this had ever happened before in my life.”
Macias Testimony
Macias said that he and Principal Noel Green asked Superintendent Yaw Obeng to put him on administrative leave after the Burlington High School student-run newspaper published a story about his charge. He’s been on paid administrative leave since Sept. 14.
He said he thought School Board Chair Clare Wool or AOE investigator Bob Stafford leaked the affidavit to the BHS Register, the student newspaper at Burlington High School.
“When they released it to the school, I could not do my job effectively,” he said.
Outside of the hearing, Wool told VTDigger she did not leak the information to the school newspaper, and Stafford said he could not answer any questions during the ongoing process. The newspaper’s publication led to a censorship confrontation at the high school.
Macias said he typically got into work at 7:30 a.m. and worked until 5:30 or 6 p.m., with days full of meetings with students, parents, and school administrators. He said almost all the students he worked with applied to college and were admitted.
Macias said his years of experience, including four years as dean of students at a school in Manchester, New Jersey, prepared him to take the job and fulfill its duties.
During the 2017 to 2018 school year, Macias said the guidance department improved by using more technology, responding more promptly to parents, and serving all students, regardless of race or economic status.
For example, the school started having a guidance counselor focus only on English-language learning students, and a counselor dedicated to ensuring freshmen had a smooth first year at the school. Overall, Macias said the department was better with the new counselors after the previous counselors resigned en masse.
“Students felt that the department was much more welcoming,” he said. “They started to come to the office more.”
During his first year at the school, Macias said the guidance department had a “toxic environment” and counselor Yvette Amblo organized a resistance to his leadership and the changes he was trying to make.
“It was a power struggle with one of the counselors from the beginning, and she led the rest of the group in fighting everything I was going to do,” he said.
Macias also pushed back against the count that he had not maintained a professional relationship with University of Vermont student who worked first as a student teacher and then as a substitute. That teacher had testified that she felt like Macias was sexually harassing her by texting her and constantly asking her to eat lunch with him.
Macias said that the issues in the guidance department led him to want to eat lunch with a colleague outside the department, and she had invited him to come into her class.
She addressed her concerns about Macias’ behavior with the administration.
He said that then-Principal Tracy Racicot and then-Assistant Principal Noel Green told him there had been no harassment and no sexual harrassment, but they wanted him to not have contact with her.
Macias also discussed the charge that he acted improperly in proctoring a standardized exam. Guzman entered into the record communication from the College Board which had alerted the school that it had investigated and did not find evidence to take any action.
Some students had stopped working on the test early and were distracting other students, Macias said. He asked testing coordinator Herb Perez what he should do, and Perez told him to let the disruptive students out of the class early.
Other charges, relating to student records, were discussed in executive session, as were the closing statements.
AOE Witnesses
The AOE called its last witness, recent BHS graduate Mary Markley, Friday morning. Markley, now a student at Stanford University, testified over the phone about her experience with Macias as her guidance counselor.
Markley said that Macias had submitted incorrect information to the colleges she applied to and lied to her about what he had submitted to colleges and scholarship programs when he was her guidance counselor.
“He made it significantly more stressful and confusing than I thought it was going to be,” Markley said. “Overall, Mr. Macias made me lose faith in the guidance department at Burlington High School … I didn’t have faith in his ability to complete things. I didn’t trust him.”
In his cross examination, Guzman focused on Markley’s successful graduation from BHS, scholarship receipt and college admission.
Other Testimony
On Thursday, the panel heard from three former guidance counselors who worked under Macias, a University of Vermont counseling graduate student who had been placed at BHS as part their program, the UVM professor who oversaw the graduate student, a BHS student, a math teacher at the high school, and vendor with BHS.
The former counselors all painted a picture of a toxic working environment, where an erratic supervisor could be particularly belligerent when challenged.
“I didn’t know from day-to-day or hour-to-hour if I was going to be yelled at or shamed in front of other people, or ignored for a long period of time. I was on edge. I cried a lot at home. I dreaded going to work. I felt unsafe,” Amblo, a 20-year veteran of the department who left after Macias’ first year at the high school, told the panel.
Both Amblo and Larissa Urban, another BHS counselor said things were tense with Macias from the start. At a staff retreat before the beginning of his first year, Macias, according to the women’s accounts, berated the department for doing a bad job.
“I remember him saying that things would be different in the department. Things need to change,” Urban said. “People have told him that we don’t work well with students of color, or diverse students or students of poverty and that things are going to be different.”
Amblo and Urban said they were stunned by that initial interaction, and that they received confusing and sometimes hostile feedback from Macias when they asked follow-up questions.
In one instance, Amblo said she asked Macias to explain how to implement a new policy about guidance counselors no longer handling social-emotional issues with students during a meeting with fellow counselors. Macias “leapt” out of his chair, Amblo said, and jabbed his finger in her face.
“‘You are the problem. You need to stop asking questions. You are the problem in this department’,” Amblo recalled Macias yelling.
Amblo and Urban publicly complained to the Burlington school board in August 2017. Media coverage of their complaints led the Agency of Education to begin its licensing investigation.
Guzman grilled the women on cross-examination, and implied they were disgruntled employees who had been resistant to change when new leadership arrived.
“Wasn’t it because it was Mrs. Amblo who was challenging the director at every given point in time?” he asked Urban. “Wasn’t it because the director came into the school Mrs. Amblo even ambushed him by wanting to switch his office?”
Simrat Peltier, another former BHS counselor, also took the stand Thursday. Peltier began working in the department the year after Urban and Amblo left the school, and said the post had been her “dream job” because she wanted to work with diverse students like new Americans.
But she said things took a turn for the worse after she included Racicot in an email regarding questions she had. Macias barged into her office later, visibly angry, to confront her and ask why she had done so.
“He said, ‘Why did you include Tracy on those emails?’ And he went on to say, like, ‘If you want to include her on those emails, then I can include her on emails about you’,” Peltier said.
She said the atmosphere soon became “toxic” and felt “emotionally unsafe,” and led her to take antidepressants for the first time. She left after her first year on the job.
Lance Smith, a UVM professor who oversees the school’s graduate counseling program, also testified that the college had decided to freeze placements at BHS after Macias took over.
Emily Russen, one of the graduate students placed under Macias, testified she was particularly taken aback with his insistence that one of the BHS students Russen was counseling be told about a rumor her boyfriend had been seen kissing another girl. Macias allegedly went ahead and told the student anyway, while she was on her way to a counseling session with Russen. The girl later disclosed suicidal thoughts.
“It guess it didn’t feel like the most responsible action to take,” Russen said.
Jackson Elder, a senior at BHS, testified Macias had allowed students to talk and act disruptively while he was proctoring an AP Statistics exam last year. And Jeff Renard, the director of the Vermont Virtual Learning Cooperative, told the panel that Macias had bungled student enrollment with the online school and accidentally overspent BHS’s budget for seats at VTVLC.
What’s Next?
The hearing concluded around 6:45 Friday evening.
The panel will now have the opportunity to ask for any additional evidence. AOE hearing officer Adam Powers will recommend findings of fact, conclusion of law and a recommended order within 40 days.
The panel has the decision-making power, and will have 30 days after Powers issues his recommendations to make a final decision.
The panel has a lot of options in what action it can take, including dismissing the charges, issuing a public or private reprimand, imposing conditions on his license, or suspending or revoking it.
Chris Pratt, superintendent of the Windham Southwest Supervisory Union school district; Francis Aumand, executive director of the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority; and Dana Peterson, interim superintendent of the Patricia A. Hannaford Career Center in Middlebury make up the panel.
