Former Lionheart Classical Academy Executive Director Kerry Bedard has filed a lawsuit for breach of contract against the Peterborough charter school, alleging she was terminated by the school’s board for repeatedly raising concerns about the school’s $10 million lease agreement with Miami billionaire Ophir Sternberg. 

Bedard also claimed that former board chair Barry Tanner of Hancock, who negotiated the lease of the building with Sternberg, had concealed his prior business relationship with Sternberg from the Lionheart board. She filed the lawsuit May 20 in Hillsborough Superior Court – South. The lawsuit names Tanner, Kim Lavallee of Hancock, Kevin MacDonald of New Ipswich and Sternberg as defendants. The suit also names Sharon Station Holdings, a New Hampshire LLC registered to Sternberg; and Star Mountain Properties, which lists Sternberg as managing member. 

Bedard’s suit claims that the board ignored her warnings about the school’s lease for the former warehouse. It states that in “January of 2024, an updated financial analysis sent to the board detailed the millions of dollars – more than $10 million in the first 10 years – that Lionheart was to spend on a 30-year-old warehouse that Sternberg had purchased for $900,000, and which public tax records indicate had been ‘mostly empty since 2018.’”

She also took issue that the lease “did not contain a provision that would allow Lionheart to terminate the lease early if it found a better location for its needs, as required under New Hampshire law.” 

“Kerry thought – and still thinks – that it was a gross misuse of public funds to funnel millions of dollars of taxpayer money into what was effectively a private real estate investment by Sternberg,” the lawsuit states.

Sternberg purchased the building, which had mostly empty since 2018, for $900,000 in 2021.

“We brought this case because we think that Kerry was not treated particularly fairly, and the evidence that comes out in these proceedings will support acts we allege, which are very serious claims,” Bedard’s attorney, Craig McMahon, said Friday. “This complaint is based on what we know so far, and as it progresses, I expect we will learn even more.” 

Mike Harner, current executive director of Lionheart Classical Academy, said he did not know anything about the lawsuit and could not comment. 

“I have not heard about it,” Harner said Friday. 

The lawsuit states that in February, Bedard “learned that Sternberg had expressly conditioned his continued involvement with the school and good graces as its landlord on (Bedard) being terminated.” 

Prior to being terminated, Bedard claimed to have received all stellar performance reviews from the board. 

“Despite the glowing reviews of her work as executive director, Kerry’s diligence and commitment to the success of Lionheart’s students would ultimately lead to her termination at the board’s hands when Kerry committed the cardinal sin of questioning a disturbing financial arrangement between Lionheart and a ‘donor,’ defendant Sternberg,” the lawsuit states.

The lawsuit also states that Bedard was “baffled” by the board’s unwillingness to question the lease agreement with Sternberg, and that “the negotiations with Sternberg were handled entirely by Tanner, with the other five members of Lionheart’s founding group, which included Kerry, ‘locked out.’”

The lawsuit states that Sternberg had agreed to donate $100,000 to Lionheart each year for 10 years in exchange for naming rights to the school, but that “instead in December of 2022, with Tanner’s acquiescence (and, with Tanner as chair, board approval) Sternberg ‘donated’ shares of one of his companies, which could not be sold for approximately a year after the donation and required Sternberg’s approval to sell at all. By the time the shares could be sold, in November 2023 (and during an interim in which Lionheart had paid Sternberg and his companies hundreds of thousands of dollars in rent and other charges), the shares were effectively worthless.” 

According to the lawsuit, in November 2023, Bedard, after learning that Sternberg’s donated shares were “worthless,” and taking into account how much the school had spent on rent and repairs, determined that “Lionheart had effectively paid their landlord for naming their school.” 

Bedard’s lawsuit alleges that by April 2024, Lionheart had paid $726,368 in rent, $350,000 on infrastructure improvements and over $2 million on retrofitting the former warehouse to Sharon Station Holdings.

In April 2024, Bedard wrote a letter formally requesting Sternberg donate the building to the school to made good on his pledge to donate $100,000 per year to the charter school. According to the lawsuit, Tanner refused to sign the letter and threatened to quit, at which point the board “decided to mollify Tanner with a softer, gentler, kinder letter to Sternberg.”

Bedard was terminated in June 2024, and the lawsuit states she was “handed a so-called ‘non-renewal’ letter that contained a series of broad statements about her purportedly ‘unsatisfactory performance’ as executive director of Lionheart. Tanner refused to elaborate further, saying Kerry’s immediate departure from Lionheart was the ‘will of the board.’”

The lawsuit states: “Sternberg and the Sternberg entities, both individually and through their agents, employees, contractors and other affiliates, likewise interfered in (Bedard’s) employment relationship with Lionheart, by, among other things, conditioning Sternberg’s fulfillment of his own donation obligations on Kerry’s termination, and otherwise pressuring the board to remove Kerry from her position.”