Arrested Highland Park teacher had recent history of ‘unprofessional,’ ‘overly harsh’ behavior toward students

A Highland Park High School foreign-language teacher who was charged with domestic battery and put on leave in August at least twice faced disciplinary action from Township High School District 113 for “unprofessional conduct” around students, district documents show. 

The Wauconda Police Department arrested Bridget Fahrner at her Wauconda home on Aug. 9 for allegedly striking and strangling a juvenile, The Record previously reported.

In an email to the D113 community a day later, Aug. 10, one day before classes were set to resume, Superintendent Dr. Chala Holland said Fahrner was “immediately placed on administrative leave per standard procedure” to give both the state and the district time to complete investigations.

D113 memos The Record obtained from a public-records request show the district’s board of education had multiple times issued a Notice to Remedy — a disciplinary measure — to Fahrner, once in February 2024 and again in October 2025, for various incidents inside Highland Park High School.

In January 2024, Fahrner engaged in “physical contact” with a student and then used her cellphone to film a different student during a Highland Park High School basketball game, according to an internal D113 investigation. 

Less than two years later, in September 2025, Fahrner, who taught Spanish, showed a foreign film in class that included nudity, gun violence and drug use, and she displayed a “level of intimacy” with students that made some feel “uncomfortable,” another internal D113 investigation determined. 

Police reports obtained through a public-records request with the Wauconda Police Department also show that officers responded to Fahrner’s home in January 2025 to investigate a minor’s domestic violence allegation against Fahrner. The Department of Child and Family Services was notified following the incident.

The Record’s attempts to contact Fahrner directly and through her attorney were unsuccessful. Public court records show her domestic battery misdemeanor case is set to go to trial in November. 

D113’s Chief of Communications Karen Warner said in an email that the district will not comment on personnel matters but confirmed that Fahrner — who, according to news articles in 2015 and 2018, has worked in the district for at least 11 years and at one time was an equity coordinator — is still on administrative leave. 

Warner said that Illinois school districts can issue notices to remedy for “a variety of workplace concerns” and that the measure is a “formal warning to address specific conduct, which is why there can be more than one Notice to Remedy documented.”

Two unrelated parents of D113 students who had encounters with Fahrner, however, expressed outrage over what they see as a pattern of inappropriate behavior that the district needs to address more seriously. 

“From what I know, and how my daughter was treated and how other students were treated, (Fahrner’s arrest) is not a surprise,” said Keith Brin, a D113 parent who had previously spoken out against Fahrner.

“She has problems and she should be nowhere near kids, certainly nowhere near kids in a school system. And shame on the school board for sustaining her as a teacher when this pattern of abuse and issues is present.”

Incident at Highland Park basketball game

On Feb. 9, 2024, Tom Krieger, D113’s then chief human resources officer, emailed a letter to Fahrner that summarized the findings of an investigation into the teacher’s recent conduct. 

According to the letter, which D113 redacted heavily before providing to The Record, an “incident” occurred involving Fahrner near a concession stand and in a hallway near an all-gender locker room during a Highland Park High School basketball game on Jan. 26, 2024.

The incident was caught on the school’s surveillance cameras, footage from which was reviewed by Highland Park High School Dean Bryan Rome and other D113 personnel, the letter says.

The redactions in the letter The Record received from D113 obscure details of the incident. 

D113 also declined to share its footage of the incident with The Record, because the video depicts minor children whose “parents/guardians have a reasonable expectation of personal privacy when their children are on school property,” the district wrote in response to a records request. 

But a less-redacted copy of Krieger’s 2024 letter to Fahrner — which a D113 parent acquired via public-records request and shared with The Record — states that three students were standing near each other when Fahrner walked by and “intentionally” pushed into the “shoulder area” of one of the students with her shoulder. Security footage reportedly captured the student being “knocked off balance for a moment.”

After the contact, Fahrner later recounted to Krieger, she “wanted to get out of that space” and planned on leaving the school, but on her way to the exit saw some of the same students.

Security footage reportedly captured those students entering an all-gender locker room. Fahrner approached the students with her “cell phone out” and recorded a 7- to 8-second video of the students, according to the D113 letter. She later showed the video to Krieger, he wrote.

Krieger’s letter included two findings of fact: Fahrner “intentionally ran into” a student near a concession stand and used her “cell phone to take video” of another student. 

During a Feb. 7, 2024, meeting with Krieger, Fahrner reportedly “shared concerns and fears about these students” and reported that she saw them “storm” out of the bleachers onto the basketball court during the game in a way she found “intimidating.”

Fahrner acknowledged she “made contact” with the student, said she “did not know how the contact was initiated” and “denied intentional contact,” Krieger wrote.

Directives, first Notice to Remedy

Fahrner’s conduct at the basketball game, Krieger wrote, violated three D113 board policies (employee ethics, student discipline and student behavior) by making physical contact and filming the students. The district’s policies provide for “disciplinary consequences that correct the behavior without intimidating or causing humiliation to students,” per Krieger. 

He continued that Fahrner could have instead used her phone to report the contact to an administrator or “simply walked away and reported the incident to one of the administrators present at the game.”

“While we understand that filming inappropriate and illegal behaviors is a method that may used to call out injustices in public spaces, it is not a method that should be employed by a professional educator in a public school setting, especially for this type of misconduct,” the letter reads.

Krieger wrote he was recommending the board approve a Notice to Remedy, which would include four directives Fahrner must follow, including not to film students with her cellphone or engage in “any physical contact with students for the purpose of discipline or intimidation.”

“Failure to comply with these directives, to even the slightest degree, could result in further disciplinary action, up to and including suspension without pay and your dismissal from your employment as a tenured teacher in this School District,” the memo states.

The D113 School Board voted unanimously in February 2024 to approve the Notice to Remedy. 

A D113 parent who requested anonymity for fear of retribution said her child was present during the January 2024 incident at the Highland Park High School basketball game. 

The parent said she watched the surveillance footage of the incident and she believed the district merely gave Fahrner a “slap on the wrist” for the inappropriate behavior. 

An Unrated Film

Fahrner received another letter on Oct. 10, 2025, summarizing a D113 investigation into her classroom conduct. 

The letter, written by D113’s current Chief Human Resources Officer Kathryn Anderson, stated that a parent of a student in one of Fahrner’s Spanish classes reported to the district that Fahrner played a movie in class that included nudity and “derogatory language.”

Anderson and Highland Park High School Principal Holly Fleischer reportedly conducted interviews that confirmed Fahrner played “Machuca,” an unrated film about the 1973 coup in Chile, for her eighth-period Spanish IV class in September 2025. 

The film “included frontal and back nudity of adolescents and depicted kissing and underage drinking,” as well as “gun violence and drug use,” the letter says. Watching the movie in class had made at least one student feel “awkward and uncomfortable,” according to the letter. 

Fahrner said that “Machuca“ is part of her department’s curriculum, but Anderson wrote that Fahrner was supposed to “fast forward through those scenes.”

More Directives, second Notice to Remedy 

Anderson’s 2025 letter, though heavily redacted, notes multiple other instances when Fahrner’s behavior in the classroom allegedly made students feel uncomfortable. 

Anderson’s letter states Fahrner displayed an “excessive vigilance toward relatively minor classroom behaviors” by, for example, slamming a computer down, removing a pencil from a student’s hand when time was called, announcing to the class that a student had received a “zero” and keeping a student outside the classroom for an extended period of time. 

The letter continues that Fahrner’s approach to student behavior “fluctuated between nurturing and aggressive” and the “inconsistency causes confusion among students and undermines their sense of security, making it difficult for them to understand expectations.”

“Feedback from students further suggests that your responses are often perceived as overly harsh or as efforts to demand students’ attention or approval,” Anderson wrote. “This has created an atmosphere where some students feel fear or discomfort, while others become anxious about disappointing you or triggering further attention.”

Fahrner reportedly said that, in at least one instance, her intent was to be “like a mom.” 

Anderson responded in writing: “…typically developing high school students are not the same as young children and this level of intimacy is unwarranted, and made some students feel uncomfortable and uncertain in your presence.”

Anderson added that “noncompliance with classroom expectations occasionally occurs,” but “there are more effective and restorative strategies to address such behaviors that maintain student dignity and avoid public reprimands.”

In recommending a Notice to Remedy against Fahrner, Anderson cited D113’s board policy concerning employee ethics, specifically its requirement that teachers must not treat students as peers and must always consider students’ age and development level. 

The notice included three directives: that Fahrner promote a respectful classroom environment, refrain from physical contact and address student misbehavior in a way that is not disruptive, and engage in two “professional development sessions” on classroom management strategies and teacher-student boundaries. 

“Failure to comply with these directives or engaging in another instance of unprofessional behavior of the type described above may result in further disciplinary action against you, including your termination from employment,” Anderson wrote. 

The D113 School Board voted unanimously on Oct. 28, 2025, to approve the Notice to Remedy.

Wauconda police reports

Sara Avalos, a spokesperson for the Lake County State’s Attorney’s Office, confirmed that there was already an active Department of Children and Family Services case involving Fahrner and her family, when Fahrner was arrested in August.

A Wauconda police report shows that officers responded to a “domestic dispute” at Fahrner’s address on Jan. 20, 2025, after a present minor allegedly informed someone “about having her mouth covered by a paper towel and being choked out” by Fahrner. 

Fahrner denied the claims and officers observed no “markings or indications of physical abuse” on the minor, but reported the incident to the DCFS before leaving, reports show.

Wauconda Police Department documents show police responded to Fahrner’s address two other times in November 2024. In those incidents, Fahrner called police to report issues with the behavior of a minor in her home, and police reported both cases to DCFS, police reports show. 

Lindsay Record, a spokesperson for DCFS, said in an email that the department does not automatically notify a person’s employer when it opens an investigation into an individual as investigations are confidential and generally only shared when necessary for child safety. 

If an individual being investigated is a teacher, DCFS would only notify the employing school district if an allegation involved a child in the individual’s care, Record wrote. 

“DCFS may also notify a school or school district if there is a safety risk to children in the workplace,” Record said.

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