The former director of nursing at Shady Side Academy, a private pre-K through grade 12 school in Fox Chapel and Pittsburgh, is suing after she said its administrators repeatedly directed her to disregard state regulations governing how medications are delivered in school and interfered with her ability to do her job.
Diane Dean, 62, of Highland Park filed the complaint in Allegheny County Common Pleas Court on Wednesday.
It includes claims for wrongful discharge and seeks compensatory and punitive damages.
“This case is about one thing: a school that repeatedly chose tuition revenue and institutional optics over the safety of medically vulnerable children, and then fired the nurse who refused to go along with it,” said Samuel J. Cordes, Dean’s attorney. “Pennsylvania law does not give school administrators the authority to override a licensed nurse’s clinical directives, and it does not permit employers to terminate nurses for insisting on compliance with the law that protects children.
“Ms. Dean did exactly what the law required of her,” Cordes said. “Shady Side Academy fired her for it.”
The complaint said Dean was never warned or disciplined before being fired on Jan. 23 after raising a number of medical concerns to school administrators.
Those included a number of alleged violations of state law such as: a failure to test employees for tuberculosis; allowing coaches to pass medication to athletes; allowing students to self-medicate on field trips; and withholding medication — like rescue inhalers — from students attending an after-school program.
A message left Wednesday with a spokesperson for the school was not immediately returned.
‘Compliance gaps’
According to the 21-page complaint, Dean was hired as director of nursing at the start of the 2025-26 school year.
In that role, the lawsuit said, Dean was responsible for delivering health services across three campuses and four schools with about 1,300 students, the lawsuit said.
Pennsylvania’s Standards of Nursing Conduct impose obligations on every registered nurse and prohibit them from knowingly allowing any other person to violate its regulations, according to the lawsuit.
Failure to comply, the statute said, can result in license revocation.
“The Pennsylvania Department of Health has explicitly confirmed that ‘school administrators do not have the authority to delegate nursing functions,’ ” the lawsuit said.
Yet, it alleged, that’s exactly what happened with Dean.
She asserted that, upon starting the job, she immediately identified “multiple foundational safety and compliance gaps that had gone unaddressed for years.”
Among the problems, the complaint said, was state-mandated emergency allergy and epinephrine training that had been required since 2020 had not been completed for the majority of faculty and staff, despite taking less than an hour.
But the lead incident, the lawsuit said, stemmed from an 8-year-old student with Type I diabetes.
Remote dosing
According to the complaint, Dean discovered in early October that the student’s grandmother had been remotely giving him insulin — which is administered through a pump implanted on the student and controlled by a smartphone — from her home while the student was at school.
The practice, the lawsuit said, had been going on for at least a year.
During the first five weeks of the school year, the complaint said, the student had been rendered unconscious at least twice from hypoglycemia, “requiring aggressive physical intervention including sternal rubs to arouse.”
“Up to 10% of children and adolescents with Type I diabetes who die do so from severe hypoglycemia,” the lawsuit said. “Repeated hypoglycemic episodes also carry the risk of permanent memory and cognitive deficits.”
When Dean discovered what was happening, the complaint continued, she notified her supervisor and convened a meeting.
At that meeting, the lawsuit said, all participants agreed that remote dosing was unlawful and unsafe.
Nonetheless, the complaint alleged that Amy Szlachetka, the vice president of finance at Shady Side Academy, directed that action be delayed, conveying that “she was concerned with ‘optics,’ the risk of ‘losing the family’ and the potential for a ‘discrimination suit.’ ”
On Oct. 5, Dean filed a formal, written objection with Szlachetka directing the school nurse to provide only emergency care to the student while remote dosing continued.
The situation resolved on Oct. 6, the lawsuit said, when the student’s mother went to campus and transferred care to the school nurse.
At a meeting in January, Szlachetka said, “ ‘Do you know we almost lost that family?’ — confirming the Academy’s overriding concern throughout the crisis had been the preservation of a tuition-paying relationship, not the safety of a medically fragile child,” the lawsuit said.
The complaint asserts that the insulin dosing situation was not isolated.
“It was the sharpest expression of a pattern of administrative interference with plaintiff’s clinical authority that had begun in the first weeks of her employment and that would intensify with each subsequent safety intervention.”
‘That’s not your area’
According to the complaint, Dean raised concerns about the after-school program — which served up to 150 students as young as 3 years old — for not having been evaluated to meet the standards for licensed child care facilities.
Dean convened a meeting where it was confirmed that after-school staff had not undergone state-mandated tuberculosis testing and most lacked CPR or first-aid training.
Further, the lawsuit said, some students at the program did not have access to rescue inhalers, which under state law can be administered only by a licensed professional or the student.
When Dean sent a formal memo to Szlachetka on the issue, the complaint said, the administrator dismissed the concerns and “directed that medically vulnerable children be excluded from the program rather than ensure their lawful access to emergency medication.”
And when Dean raised the issue of implementing a TB testing program, the complaint said, Szlachetka dismissed it “with a wave of her hand, stating, ‘Oh, that’s not your area.’ ”
When Dean was fired, she was given one week to move out of the campus housing that was part of her employment contract.
Dean earned a base annual salary of $95,000, plus benefits and housing.