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STOCKTON – from www.record.net- Heidi Kaeslin struggled to maintain her composure as she sat in an attorney’s office in downtown Stockton one month ago and discussed the events that led to her 2012 firing from her job as a Lincoln High School special-education teacher.

“I can’t walk into a grocery store without somebody saying something,” Kaeslin said that morning. “I can’t go anywhere. I’ll get questions like, ‘Oh, do you still have custody of your kids?’ That’s pretty hard as a mom to hear that. … And I’ve heard them whisper, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s the porn teacher.’ It’s really hard.”

It would soon get harder.

On March 29, 10 days after Kaeslin spoke, a three-member panel from the state Office of Administrative Hearings unanimously affirmed Lincoln Unified’s decision to fire her. Kaeslin, 37, is alleged to have operated pornographic websites on a school computer with a then-Stockton police officer as her partner.

Lincoln Unified formally adopted the panel’s decision at Wednesday night’s board meeting. According to Lincoln Unified attorney Marleen Sacks, Kaeslin has until April 26 to ask the Office of Administrative Hearings to reconsider its ruling and until May 27 to appeal the matter in San Joaquin County Superior Court. Kaeslin’s plans are unknown; her attorney, Tom Driscoll, did not respond to several phone messages seeking comment.

The panel’s 52-page written ruling came following a 16-day hearing spread over a four-month span. According to Lincoln Unified Superintendent Tom Uslan, the district’s legal fees for the hearing will be about $200,000 once all bills are received.

The panel ruled that numerous files on the Lincoln Unified laptop computer once used by Kaeslin were “pornographic,” “lewd and distasteful,” “offensive and vulgar” or “repugnant.” It found her conduct to be “immoral” and ruled that her activities “constituted evident unfitness for service.” Kaeslin’s dismissal was appropriate, the panel ruled, even though she “demonstrated satisfactory teaching skills.”

On March 19, Kaeslin conducted what to date has been her only interview on the matter. Sometimes teary-eyed, sometimes angry, she provided her defense in a life-altering saga that has put her future as a teacher in severe jeopardy:

» She said she is the victim of a vendetta by her estranged husband, who was angered by her extramarital affair with a since-retired Lincoln High resource officer, Rich Fields.

» She said her involvement in creating illicit websites that never went commercial lasted only a few days. After that brief time spent sorting commercially produced videos into pornographic categories, she decided she didn’t want “anything to do with adult entertainment.”

» She said she was harmed by a lack of deep knowledge of how and when information is saved on computer hard drives.

» She said it is the “culture” in Lincoln Unified for teachers to use district time and equipment for personal business and that she is the victim of a double standard.

Kaeslin said she and her husband, Trent, are embroiled in divorce proceedings and share custody of their two young children. Before her husband learned of her affair, she said, she used working on the websites as a pretext for spending time with Fields.

“From Day One,” Kaeslin said, “Rich wanted my help, and we joked about how we’re business partners because that was the way that we could have our affair.”

Kaeslin admits she used the district laptop to access files containing pornographic material but said she purposely did not save the files to the computer’s hard drive and never realized they would nonetheless remain on the device.

She also said some of her former co-workers also conducted activities unrelated to their jobs during school hours and on district equipment but were never punished by Lincoln Unified. Kaeslin said if she had been assisting Fields in the “hot-air balloon business,” she “wouldn’t be in the same spot.”

“I did make a bad decision,” Kaeslin said. “When I said that I stopped, I felt like I corrected that part of my bad decision-making process.”

The panel was not swayed. Time and again, the written decision refers to Kaeslin’s contentions as “without merit.” The panel members did not buy Kaeslin’s statement that she was involved for just a few days.

During the mid-March interview, Kaeslin was still hoping the panel would see things her way.

“Some people might say, ‘What you did was immoral,’ ” she said. “I feel like what I did personally, I should not have done. That’s why I stopped. Yes, I made a bad decision, not just about accessing and categorizing but even just having an affair. Yeah, I made some bad choices. Do I feel like I should be fired over it? No.”