--- title: "Fired Concord Teacher Says Her Principal and the Arbitrator Both Relied on AI" description: "Christine Apollos says the arbitrator asked GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5 about her AI-detection evidence without telling either side." author: "rews desk" published: 2026-10-19T18:28:32.535Z modified: 2026-10-20T03:04:21Z url: https://rews.cc/a/fired-concord-teacher-says-her-principal-and-the-arbitrator--fdc513 language: en tags: ["ai", "education", "law", "labor", "discrimination", "us"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Fired Concord Teacher Says Her Principal and the Arbitrator Both Relied on AI *Christine Apollos says the arbitrator asked GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5 about her AI-detection evidence without telling either side.* By rews desk · October 19, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/fired-concord-teacher-says-her-principal-and-the-arbitrator--fdc513 ## In brief - Christine Apollos, a Concord, Mass., kindergarten teacher fired in 2025, sued on Sept. 28 to overturn an arbitration ruling - She says Principal Justin Sparks used AI to write the evaluation that led to her dismissal - The district says Mr. Sparks used only an AI grammar checker and cites a series of poor reviews - The arbitrator upheld the firing on Aug. 27 and gave the AI allegation no weight - The suit says he consulted GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5 about GPTZero without telling either party A Concord, Mass., kindergarten teacher sued on Sept. 28 to undo the ruling that upheld her firing, saying her principal used AI to write her evaluation and the arbitrator used chatbots to weigh her evidence. The teacher, Christine Apollos, had taught at Thoreau Elementary for more than 20 years when the Concord-Carlisle Regional School District fired her on Aug. 14, 2025, according to [Boston.com](https://www.boston.com/news/local-news/2026/10/18/artificial-intelligence-concord-kindergarten-teacher/) and [The Concord Bridge](https://concordbridge.org/index.php/2026/10/13/ai-vs-ai-thoreau-teachers-firing-raises-complex-questions/), a local news site, which identified the arbitrator as Thomas Kochan. In the complaint, filed in Suffolk County Superior Court, Ms. Apollos asks a judge to vacate his Aug. 27 decision and order a new hearing before a different arbitrator, [The Boston Globe reported](https://bostonglobe.com/2026/10/19/metro/concord-kindergarten-teacher-principal-ai-fire/). “Mr. Sparks failed to base his ratings on his own professional judgment in the Summative Evaluation; instead he relied on the judgment of artificial intelligence,” her filing says of the principal, Justin Sparks. The district and Mr. Sparks say he used only an AI grammar checker and that she was let go after a run of weak performance reviews. Ms. Apollos’s lawyers declined to comment. A spokesperson for the district told Boston.com that it does not comment on pending litigation. ![A robotic arm holds a red pencil over paper on a wooden school desk beside an apple, casting a humanlike shadow on a sunlit wall.](https://rews.cc/img/a9ae9d2ab769c4d67729916763368e2649c843e8.webp) The two sides met in several arbitration hearings between January and May. Massachusetts law lets teachers with professional teaching status, which usually comes after three years in a district, take a dismissal to arbitration. Such teachers can be fired only for “inefficiency, incompetency, incapacity, conduct unbecoming a teacher, insubordination or failure on the part of the teacher to satisfy teacher performance standards,” according to the statute. At the hearings, the district pointed to a series of “unsatisfactory” and “needs improvement” ratings, according to the arbitrator’s decision. Mr. Sparks and at least two other administrators evaluated her from 2023 to 2025, court records show. Ms. Apollos said her reviews were “acceptable” until Mr. Sparks became principal in 2022, and she blames the decline on “age bias.” She also says the summative evaluation that called for her dismissal cites parts of the teacher evaluation rubric that don’t exist. She ran several of Mr. Sparks’s reports through GPTZero, a detection tool, which judged them “likely written by AI,” according to the decision. Whether he used AI, she argues, bears on whether his testimony is “credible” and whether he “exercised his own professional judgment.” ![A wooden ladder with a large gap in its middle stands beside a chair in a sunlit blue room, with small chairs along the walls.](https://rews.cc/img/fa4f902c488a36c0e844c1d65d8ca1612a66fbf0.webp) The arbitrator sided with the district. He found that it had followed proper procedure and had not discriminated against her because of her age. He called the errors in the evaluation “troubling” but said they did not outweigh her history of poor reviews, and he gave the AI allegation “no weight.” How he got there is the heart of the lawsuit. To test whether GPTZero could be trusted, the arbitrator asked two chatbots, GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5, to describe it, and their answers said the tool isn’t always accurate, according to the decision. Neither party was told. The complaint says that left Ms. Apollos no chance to “rebut” the findings and that the inquiry, conducted “outside of the hearing record,” was misconduct that may have breached the arbitrator’s duty of neutrality. She also challenges the research the chatbots pointed to. The studies were outdated and made a false comparison, the suit says, and some came from GPTZero’s competitors “with an interest in undermining GPTZero’s reputation.” A second claim concerns the age discrimination finding. The suit says the arbitrator made Ms. Apollos “prove” the district discriminated, shifting the burden onto her, when Massachusetts law puts the burden on the district to prove its case. Ms. Apollos must serve the lawsuit by Dec. 28, and the district has until Jan. 26 to file its answer, according to court records.