The Boss Who Thought He Was Being Watched All the Time

Lisa Krause became principal of the Oriskany Central School District’s junior-senior high school in December 2014. She was a new principal, still learning the role, mentored by an external coach who described her as doing “a fine job.” Her supervisor was Superintendent Greg Kelahan, and within months, her professional life became a documented exercise in targeted humiliation.

Kelahan commented on Krause’s office decorations as “very girly.” He interrogated her parenting skills between five and ten times with the rhetorical question, “What kind of mother are you?” When Krause had to leave school to care for her injured daughter and the emotional weight of Kelahan’s treatment brought her to tears, he said it plainly: “That’s why I hate working with women so much. They are always so emotional.”

Kelahan surveilled Krause’s clothing and the clothing of other women in the building. He told Krause he “love[d] it when women wear dresses.” He criticized a teacher for short skirts and a guidance counselor for wearing what he called “men’s suits.” He asked Krause’s own external mentor to “try to get [Krause] to dress better” before he had even hired the mentor to help Krause develop professionally. The mentor met Krause and thought her outfits were entirely appropriate.

The Surveillance Text That Should Have Ended His Career

At one point, Kelahan photographed Krause without her knowledge, then texted her the image with the message: “See, you are always being watched.” He later described this to the court as “silliness.” The jury did not agree.

Meanwhile, Kelahan treated the male elementary school principal as a buddy and, by all accounts, treated him with dignity. Witnesses testified that no one ever heard Kelahan disrespect, demean, or scream at any male employee. The contrast was stark enough that multiple colleagues, not just Krause, noticed and documented it.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What the Dollar Amount Doesn’t Cover

A jury can put a number on lost wages. It can calculate pain and suffering. What it cannot quantify is what it costs to spend every workday in a building where your boss shows up multiple times a day, without warning, specifically to monitor you; where he has already told the school board he intends to replace you before he sits across from you in a so-called improvement meeting; and where you watch your own authority erode in real time because the man above you whispers to your staff that you want them fired.

Krause’s mentor, a retired principal who had supervised dozens of new administrators, testified that Krause “didn’t seem to have any autonomy in her office” and “really couldn’t take a step either way without getting permission from Mr. Kelahan.” That is the texture of Kelahan’s abuse: operational suffocation wrapped in paperwork. He appeared in Krause’s building several times a day, and sometimes stayed all day, specifically making it “very difficult [for Krause] to create [her] authority in that building.” He was not managing. He was dismantling.

Kelahan designed Krause’s work assignments to be “as convoluted as possible so that she w[ould] fail,” according to Krause’s own trial testimony. He blocked positive news from reaching the board. When the school achieved a landmark result in August 2016 — 100 percent of students passing the Algebra II Regents Exam, up from 35 percent the prior year — Krause wanted the board to know. Kelahan did not permit her to share the results. A person’s professional wins were treated as his property to withhold.

He Lied to the Board About the Improvement Plan

Perhaps the most calculated element of Kelahan’s campaign against Krause was the Principal Improvement Plan that he both manufactured and buried. In March 2016, he sent a letter to the board promising to develop a PIP for Krause. He then drafted a PIP with goals Krause and her mentor agreed were unachievable — including a directive to “make faculty and staff stop talking about him.” This was not a professional development tool. It was a trap. Krause’s mentor told her not to sign it. Kelahan agreed to revise it and never followed up.

Months later, when Kelahan formally recommended Krause’s termination, he listed as a reason her failure to improve “despite being on a Principal Improvement Plan.” She was never on a Principal Improvement Plan. Two board members who voted to fire her testified under oath that they did not know she had never been placed on a PIP when they cast their votes. Kelahan misled the body that trusted him to conduct a fair process, and the board voted 6-to-1 to terminate her employment on the basis of at least partially false information.

The Board Watched It Happen and Did Nothing

In March 2016, a community member stood before the board and named what was happening. Robyn Appler, who had observed Kelahan’s conduct firsthand as a school substitute, warned the board directly: “We finally have a good principal and you are trying to push her out the door.” She described Kelahan’s “bullying behavior” to the elected officials whose job was to address it. In the days after that board meeting, Krause testified, Kelahan’s treatment of her became “ten times worse.” He refused to look at her. He would walk away if she tried to speak with him for more than thirty seconds. The board had been warned. The board did not act. Six months later, the board followed Kelahan’s recommendation and fired her.

Legal Receipts: They Said the Quiet Part Out Loud

“That’s why I hate working with women so much. They are always so emotional.” — Greg Kelahan, Superintendent, spoken to Lisa Krause after she cried during a confrontation about her injured daughter; corroborated by mentor Margaret Beck

“See, you are always being watched.” — Greg Kelahan, text message to Lisa Krause accompanying a photograph he had secretly taken of her; Kelahan described this to the court as “silliness”

“We finally have a good principal and you are trying to push her out the door.” — Robyn Appler, community member and later board appointee, addressing the Oriskany Board of Education directly at a March 2016 board meeting regarding Kelahan’s treatment of Krause

“Despite being on a Principal Improvement Plan, and despite mentoring, [she had] not demonstrated adequate improvement in [her] performance.” — Greg Kelahan, in his formal written termination recommendation to the Board of Education, September 2016; the court found this assertion was “at least partly false” because Krause was never placed on a PIP

“[His] intent [was] still to help [Krause] find a more suitable job for her skill set and to recommend termination of [her] probationary appointment.” — Greg Kelahan, in a letter to the Board of Education dated March 1, 2016 — the same month he was ostensibly drafting a good-faith Principal Improvement Plan to help her succeed

“I would be developing an improvement plan with [Krause] for the remainder of this school year.” — Greg Kelahan, in the same March 1, 2016 letter to the board; while simultaneously disclosing in the same letter his intent to terminate her and recruit a replacement

Societal Impact: This Isn’t Just One Principal’s Problem

Public Institutions Weaponized Against Women

Kelahan ran a public school district — a tax-funded institution with a legal and ethical obligation to the community it serves. The conduct documented in this case did not happen in a corporate boardroom or a private club. It happened in a building where children learn, and it was funded by local taxpayers who had no idea their superintendent was texting surveillance photos to the principal and blocking her from sharing good news with an elected board.

The Oriskany Central School District’s board received a direct public warning in March 2016 that Kelahan’s behavior was abusive and that a capable principal was being pushed out. The board did not investigate. The board did not discipline Kelahan. Six months later, the board voted 6-to-1 to fire Krause based partly on a lie Kelahan had told them about an improvement plan that never existed. The machinery of institutional authority served the abuser, not the person being abused.

This is the societal pattern that individual lawsuits can document but cannot fully dismantle. Women in positions of professional authority routinely face supervisors who frame emotional responses to workplace abuse as evidence of professional inadequacy. Kelahan’s own words demonstrate the mechanism: he manufactured distress in Krause through surveillance, threats, and public humiliation, then used her visible distress as a performance metric against her.

Economic Inequality: Who Pays When Institutions Fail Women

Lisa Krause spent years of her career fighting a termination that a jury unanimously found was motivated by gender discrimination. She filed a complaint with the New York Department of Human Rights. She filed with the EEOC. She went to state court in 2017. The case did not reach its final federal appellate resolution until December 2025. That is eight years of her professional life spent in the legal system to recover wages she should never have lost. The $334,456 (enough to cover eight years of median teacher salary, with money to spare) in lost income the jury awarded her represents years of earnings she had to fight to reclaim.

Meanwhile, the school district spent public money defending Kelahan’s conduct through a six-day trial, post-trial motions, and a full federal appeal that reached the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. The total legal exposure, including the $484,456 jury award plus $130,186.31 in attorney’s fees and expenses, came to $614,642.31 (enough to fund a new teacher’s salary for over 15 years). That money came from a public school district serving two small schools in upstate New York. Every dollar spent litigating Kelahan’s behavior was a dollar not spent on students.

The economic cost of tolerating institutional sexism does not fall on the superintendent. It falls on the community. Kelahan left the Oriskany Central School District in July 2017 to become Superintendent of the Watkins Glen School District. He moved on. The financial and institutional damage stayed behind in Oriskany.

The Cost of a Life: What They Saved by Not Doing the Right Thing

What Now: Names, Watchlists, and What You Can Do

The People Who Made This Decision

• Greg Kelahan — Former Superintendent, Oriskany Central School District; departed July 2017 for Watkins Glen School District. No personal financial penalty from this verdict.
• Carl Grazadei — Board President at time of termination
• Michelle Anderson, Robyn Appler, Therese Hanna, Adam Kernan, Amy Mayo — Board Members who voted on Krause’s termination
• Tad Beaver, Charles Courtney, Donald Rothdeiner, Patrick Hoehn — Former Board Members during Krause’s tenure
• Shirley Burtch — Board Vice President

Watchlist: Who Is Supposed to Prevent This

• EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) — Federal agency that issued Krause her Right-to-Sue letter. File complaints at eeoc.gov.
• New York State Division of Human Rights — State-level agency where Krause filed her original complaint in February 2017.
• New York State Education Department — Oversees superintendent certification and district accountability statewide.
• Local School Boards — Elected by your community. Attend board meetings. Public comment periods exist. Use them.

What Grassroots Action Actually Looks Like Here

If you work in a public institution — a school, a hospital, a government office — and your supervisor behaves the way Kelahan behaved, document everything in writing, date it, and send copies to yourself outside your work email. Mentors and witnesses matter: Beck’s corroborating testimony was central to Krause winning this case. Build your network before you need it.

Support teacher and educator unions in your district. Collective bargaining agreements exist precisely because individual workers facing institutional power need structural protection, not just legal remedies that take eight years to finalize. The fight for enforceable anti-harassment policies in public employment is a fight worth showing up for at your local board meeting before it becomes a federal case.

Follow organizations like the National Women’s Law Center and the National Education Association, which track workplace discrimination cases in public education and lobby for stronger protections. Share documented cases like this one. Sunlight is the cheapest accountability tool available.