The Cary Academy greater family has been stirred up this last week over The N&O's coverage of a campus controversy. With good reason. The paper's coverage of the situation has been puzzling.

On Dec. 11, The News & Observer posted on its Web site a brief story saying police were looking into allegations of inappropriate conduct by a teacher. The story named the teacher and said he had resigned. But several hours after posting the story, The N&O removed it from the Web edition and did not publish the story in print editions the next day.

Then, last Monday, N&O columnist Ruth Sheehan took up the case in her column. She suggested that school officials tried to hush up the situation by asking students and parents not to comment on the case. The teacher was allowed to resign rather than be fired, she noted. "Problem resolved. The school's image intact," she concluded. "Apparently, at Cary Academy, that's what matters."

That same day, Cary police issued a statement saying they had investigated the matter and found no cause to issue charges. It said a videotape had been made, but that the taping was accidental and the tape was destroyed.

Sheehan and I were showered with e-mails about her column, many of them complaining that The N&O had unfairly dragged the school and the teacher through the mud.

"It's base journalism, suited more to the likes of Fox or a tabloid paper," wrote Rich Weems of Cary. "Is there no general consensus of what constitutes fairness? Is it part of the N&O policy that, though there may not be a story, one of the columnists can write about rumor and gossip related to a story?"

Other e-mails praised the column for putting a spotlight on the school.

The issue does raise questions: Why did The N&O run a story online but not in print? Why did it not run a story in the paper, but then publish a column? Was the coverage unfair to the teacher? And why should the newspaper be poking its nose into the affairs of a private school anyway, where there is no apparent public interest?

Sheehan said she jumped into the issue because of the school's conduct. "The column wasn't about the actions of the teacher," she said. "It was about the school's handling of allegations of improper conduct by a teacher, which has been an issue of great concern (nationally) over the last several months."

She objected that the school administration had tried to hush up the situation and hadn't notified police. (Cary police investigated after receiving an anonymous tip.) Allowing the teacher to resign, instead of firing him, she said, meant he could end up in a classroom somewhere else.

I understand Sheehan's argument, which also gets to the question of why this matter is of interest to anyone outside Cary Academy's suburban campus.

But in castigating the school administration, was the column fair to the teacher? I frankly worry about that. He was cleared by police of criminal activity, after all. But he lost his job after a school investigation. Did he do anything wrong?

We don't know. Nor do members of the Cary Academy community, or the broader public. I think the column properly raised questions about the school's handling of the affair but should not have suggested the teacher should have been fired, absent confirmed information about what happened. Sheehan did not name the teacher in the column, but he had been identified in the earlier Web posting.

The column aside, The N&O's handling of the story was strange. John Drescher, the managing editor, said the story was removed from the Web edition because the investigation was based on an anonymous tip and was still under police investigation. There was no paper trail.

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