Teacher challenges firing ruling over arbitrator’s AI-assisted research

Christine Apollos is asking a Massachusetts court to overturn the arbitration ruling that upheld her firing, arguing that the arbitrator improperly used AI to assess her evidence. Her September 28 lawsuit challenges research into an AI detector that, she says, neither side had a chance to contest, according to Boston.com.

The evaluations behind the dismissal

Apollos taught kindergarten at Thoreau Elementary School in Concord for more than 20 years. She was dismissed on August 14, 2025, after Principal Justin Sparks gave her an unsatisfactory overall rating. She later challenged the dismissal through arbitration.

During hearings between January and May 2026, the district pointed to evaluations rating her performance unsatisfactory or needing improvement. Sparks and at least two other administrators conducted those reviews from 2023 to 2025. Apollos countered that her evaluations had been acceptable until Sparks became principal in 2022, and alleged that age bias drove the decline.

She also alleged that Sparks used AI to produce the final evaluation recommending her dismissal. The document, she said, referred to portions of the teacher evaluation rubric that did not exist. Her challenge concerned both the authorship of the assessment and whether Sparks had exercised his own professional judgment.

To support that allegation, Apollos submitted Sparks’s reports to GPTZero, a tool designed to detect AI-written text. It identified several as likely AI-generated, according to the arbitration decision. Sparks denied using AI to write the evaluations, saying his use was limited to grammar checks.

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

Apollos’s argument in court documents, as quoted by Boston.com

The arbitrator’s own AI inquiry

Arbitrator Thomas Kochan described his research in an appendix to his decision, The Concord Bridge reported. He used GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 5 to examine GPTZero’s reliability. Kochan said he independently reviewed some of the sources the tools supplied and found that their descriptions accurately reflected the cited material.

Kochan concluded that GPTZero’s results were not reliable enough to carry weight in the case, noting that detectors can classify human writing as AI-generated. He gave no weight to Apollos’s allegation about AI authorship. On August 27, 2026, he upheld her dismissal, finding proper procedure and no age discrimination by the district.

The evaluation’s errors did not disappear from his assessment. Kochan called them “troubling,” but found they were not enough to set aside Apollos’s history of poor performance reviews. His decision therefore rejected both her discrimination argument and the weight she sought for the detector’s findings.

A challenge to the hearing process

Apollos’s lawsuit argues that Kochan conducted an improper investigation outside the hearing record. She says neither party was told about the research or allowed to challenge its findings. That objection targets how he reached his conclusion, not simply whether GPTZero’s assessment should have been accepted.

She also disputes the research itself. Her complaint alleges that studies cited by the AI tools were outdated, made an inappropriate comparison, or came from competitors with an interest in undermining GPTZero. Those are her allegations, rather than court findings about the detector or the studies.

A separate argument within the same lawsuit concerns the burden of proof. Apollos alleges that Kochan improperly required her to prove age discrimination, rather than requiring the district to establish its grounds for dismissal. She asks Suffolk Superior Court to vacate the ruling and order a new hearing before a different arbitrator.

The district declined to comment on pending litigation, and Apollos’s representation also declined comment to Boston.com. Court records described by the outlet set December 28 as the deadline for serving the lawsuit and January 26 for the district’s answer.