This is so bizarre - I just don't get it. I read through the whole allegation of what happened; if true, the parents belief that the teachers (especially one of them) began by majorly overstepping boundaries and then convinced the daughters to engage in a series of weird behaviors that ended in cutting off all contact with the family, but the story doesn't pass the smell test.
First of all, the whole thing would have required an utter abdication of responsibility on the part of the parents for YEARS. They claim that it wasn't until the youngest daughter "broke free" that they learned that Mastoloni had been consistently teaching spiritual concepts during class, but well before that they evidently knew that their minor daughters were spending significant amounts of time after school with teachers. Why didn't they put a stop to it? What parent in their right mind, especially in this day and age, wouldn't at least call the school and say "hey, Senora M is keeping my daughter after school for hours on the pretense of "TA work" or "two of your Spanish teachers showed up at my house to hang out with my college-age daughter"?. And then, after two daughters have already started exhibiting strange behaviors, you apparently make no attempt to ensure that your youngest doesn't get assigned the same teacher - and then allow her to spend a week alone with the two sisters?
While the parents claim they didn't know about the religious aspect, it also sounds as if they were fully aware that the teachers were eating lunch with the daughter, sharing inappropriate information with her, having her teach the class and grade the exams of other students. Again, where were they?
This story also requires us to believe that over a period of years, no other student reported, or faculty member observed, the odd behavior of these teachers or the bizarrely close relationship that had developed between them and these girls. These are high school kids, not third graders. If a teacher was consistently blathering on about deeply personal issues and New-Agey mumbo-jumbo, not to mention singling out favorites who were empowered to grade other students and occasionally teach the class, I'm pretty sure it would have come up before now. Avon is a middle-class suburb, the kind of place where parents tend to be pretty involved and not shy about speaking up.
Even stranger, we'd have to accept that one high school Spanish department had three kooky teachers who - again, in the age of sex abuse scandals and hyper vigilance -- saw nothing wrong with establishing personal friendships with minors and who may be members of a cult, as well as a guidance counselor who is backing the teachers and retaliating against a 17 year old to the point where she won't write her a college recommendation.
And I just had to laugh at one charge, which was that one of the teachers was teaching "magical realism." That's a literary genre, you guys, not a religious concept! If they're including something that facially absurd, you have to wonder what other misinterpretations and outright fabrications are showing up.
Looking forward to hearing more on this.
