A former kindergarten teacher in Concord, Massachusetts, is asking a state court to cancel the arbitration ruling that upheld her firing, because the arbitrator used AI chatbots to settle a question about AI and told neither side. Christine Apollos taught at Thoreau Elementary School for more than 20 years and was dismissed in 2025. She claims her principal, Justin Sparks, used AI to write the evaluation that recommended her dismissal, and says it cites sections of the teacher rating guide that do not exist. The district and Sparks say only an AI grammar checker was used and that the firing followed a series of weak reviews. During arbitration, Apollos ran the reports through GPTZero, a program that estimates whether a text was machine-written, and it rated several of them as likely written by AI.

In his August 27 decision, the arbitrator upheld the firing, found no age discrimination and gave “no weight” to the AI claim, though he called the errors in the evaluations “troubling.” To judge GPTZero, he asked two chatbots, OpenAI’s GPT-5.4 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5, to describe it, and their answers said it is not always accurate. Neither side was told about this research, so Apollos could not challenge it. Her lawsuit, filed September 28 in Suffolk County Superior Court, calls this misconduct and asks for a new hearing before a different arbitrator. The district has until January 26 to answer.