After nearly two dozen meetings, the months-long disciplinary case hearings for a former Plainview-Old Bethpage School District principal have concluded, with a decision expected in early 2026.
Karen Heitner, the former principal of Pasadena Elementary School, has been accused of inappropriately touching two female employees, pressuring four older female workers to retire and creating a hostile work environment for other employees.
If she is proven guilty, Heitner could lose her tenure and be fired by the district. Disciplinary hearings are typically held in-house, but Heitner opted to have the hearing be public.
The hearings began in April, spanning a total of eight months before concluding on Wednesday, Dec. 10. Heitner concluded her testimony and cross-examination on Wednesday, emphasizing that she doesn’t find the allegations against her to be true.
“This is why I am here. I am fighting these allegations. They aren’t true,” the former principal said during the district’s attorney Christopher Mestecky’s cross-examination.
One allegation Heitner faces is of harassment of a technology aide at Pasadena Elementary School, where she allegedly asked the employee to do things outside of her job description, including climbing onto the school roof and taking pictures of students from an unsecured ladder.
Heitner has said throughout the hearings that the employee had “volunteered.”
On Wednesday, Heitner said that, looking back at the situation, she should have done the job herself.
Heitner’s is also alleged to have discriminated against four employees based on their age.
Heitner denied most of the claims when Donarummo spoke to her during the investigation, a stance she continued to maintain on Wednesday.
Two other employees alleged that Heitner created a hostile work environment in Donarummo’s investigation.
Heitner has also faced administrative charges alleging she touched two staffers inappropriately during a PTA luncheon in June 2024.
One of the staffers alleged that Heitner grabbed her butt and said, “I goosed you,” which was followed by the principal kicking her.
Mestecky showed surveillance footage of the alleged incident early on in the hearings.
The staffer said later that day she ran into Heitner in the hallway and the principal said, “There is the ass-graber.” The staffer said she replied, “I don’t put my hands on people, Karen.”
Another incident included Heitner allegedly telling the staffer, “Why don’t you stick your tongue in the hole and suck it out?” when she asked what was inside a pink and green donut.
Another employee alleged that she was mourning the death of her husband when Heitner publicly accused her of “engaging in a sexual threesome” and making other sexual comments toward her.”
In her testimony earlier in December, Heitner denied that she sexually harassed the two employees at the luncheon or made sexual remarks on other occasions, statements she continued to back during the final hearing.
The two staffers filed suit against Heitner, the district and its administration for the alleged incident and have claimed that administrators downplayed the principal’s behavior while failing to protect them.
Mestecky spent much of the final hearing asking Heitner questions about several of the instances, frequently comparing what she said to his questions with the district’s initial investigation, conducted in 2024 by Christopher Donarummo, Plainview-Old Bethpage’s assistant superintendent for human resources and safety.
He repeatedly told Heitner that he just wanted her to “say the truth” while asking her about the allegations. He asked her multiple times if her testimony differed from what she had said during the investigation, as well as if other staffers and administrators who had testified during previous hearings had lied during their testimonies.
Heitner, on several occasions, told Mestecky that she had been speaking the truth the whole time.
During his testimony in April, Donarummo said his investigation found that multiple discrepancies between what staffers said and what Heitner had said.
Heitner’s attorney Edward Heilig, previously called Donarummo a “bad investigator,” something that state-appointed hearing officer James Brown acknowledged at the final hearing during Mestecky’s questioning of the former principal.
Over the course of the hearings, Heitner has alleged that some of her accusers were unhappy with her for several reasons and had wanted her to leave the district.
Mestecky asked Heitner about the “cabal” of staffers, to which she said that Donarummo’s investigation was unfair to her.
State-appointed hearing officer James Brown told both Heitner’s attorneys and the district’s attorneys to file post-hearing briefs by Feb. 11, 2026, with a written decision with findings likely to come within 30 days after the filings.
