Legal and Regulatory Fallout: The Starboard Academy Preschool Lawsuits

Plymouth, Mass-Three families who accused a Plymouth preschool of neglecting their toddlers have reached confidential settlements with Starboard Academy and its former owner, while two more lawsuits involving Kingston children remain active in Plymouth Superior Court. The five lawsuits, filed between September 2024 and January 2025, center on allegations that a former teacher, Jessica Taylor, screamed at children, flipped one onto a nap cot, and told a child to “shut the f-up.”

The settlements were reported by the Plymouth Independent, which has tracked the case since 2024. The families involved in the three settled suits were seeking money damages for medical expenses, injuries, and pain and suffering. Under Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 231, Section 140C 1/2, any settlement resolving a personal injury claim on behalf of a minor requires formal court petition and judicial approval.

The children at the center of the lawsuits were one or two years old when the alleged incidents occurred, according to the lawsuits. Families said the children showed distress, illness or clinginess at drop-off after time in Taylor’s classroom; one child came home with bruised hips and groin, and another woke in the middle of the night crying uncontrollably. All of the children have since left Starboard Academy, and families said their symptoms improved afterward.

The Massachusetts Department of Early Education and Care, which oversees roughly 9,000 programs for infants, toddlers and preschoolers statewide, opened its investigation into Starboard Academy in September 2024. According to documents cited by the Plymouth Independent, state investigators found the school stonewalled, dissembled and delayed the inquiry, and ultimately determined Starboard Academy failed to comply with 11 state regulations — including rules that prohibit abuse or neglect and require schools to report incidents promptly to parents. Those standards fall under 606 CMR 7.00, the state’s mandatory supervision rules that bar physical restraint, verbal degradation, or rough handling during classroom and nap hours.

The resulting EEC report, issued in May 2024, ran 13 pages. In it, an EEC investigator wrote that the program provided countless misleading and false statements. The department also found that Taylor terrified young children by repeatedly screaming at them and handling them roughly, while Taylor herself denied being physically aggressive with children in 2024. Another teacher reported seeing Taylor pick up an awake toddler from a nap cot and slam the child down face first, and told Tonya Stump, the school’s owner at the time, about the incident. Stump told investigators she was not made aware of the alleged misconduct when it happened, according to the EEC report — a claim families dispute, charging that the owner was informed of at least one troubling incident and covered it up.

The state’s scrutiny of Starboard Academy wasn’t limited to Taylor’s classroom. A December 2024 state investigation, also detailed by the Plymouth Independent, found that Starboard’s operators dismissed allegations that a male employee had repeatedly touched a female colleague in front of children and sent explicit workplace messages to co-workers, and that management stonewalled that inquiry as well. Stump has denied the allegations against her and disputed the findings of the state’s report.

Starboard Academy was sold in 2025 to Stellar Education LLC, which has said it purchased the company’s assets. The sale was backed by Boston private equity firm Seacoast Capital, which announced in January 2026 that it provided unitranche debt and equity co-investment to fund the acquisition of the preschool network’s Massachusetts locations. Before the sale, Starboard operated several schools, including its Industrial Park Road campus in Plymouth, one site in Marshfield, and two centers on Cape Cod.

Once the company was sold and relicensed under Stellar Education, the state’s scathing reports vanished from the EEC’s public website — a consequence of agency policy that removes prior investigative and citation histories once a facility changes ownership. Anyone seeking those historical records must now file a formal public records request to obtain them. Former co-owner Sydney Philibin, Stump’s daughter, was retained as vice president of administration and strategy under the new ownership, even as Stump’s name was removed from the school’s public site, the Plymouth Independent reported.

The two lawsuits still active involve children from Kingston. One case concerns a child who experienced extreme terrors and required medical specialists starting in March 2024; the other involves a child who was 16 months old while in Taylor’s class. In January 2026, Judge Leighton ordered the appointment of an outside discovery master to manage pre-trial evidence disputes and document exchanges across the pending suits, underscoring how contentious the discovery process has become.

One mother with a case still pending said she cannot settle for her own peace of mind, telling the outlet the matter should be heard in court for the benefit of her family and the wider community. Any eventual settlements in those two remaining cases will also require judicial approval before they can be finalized.

The delays and disputes in the Starboard case echo broader findings from a November 2024 performance audit by the Massachusetts Office of the State Auditor, which found that the Department of Early Education and Care failed to consistently conduct timely investigations or complete required background checks for reported abuse and neglect cases at state-licensed facilities during 2021 and 2022. That audit offers context for why families and court officials alike have faced a prolonged fight to get answers in the Starboard case, even as the company itself has changed hands and its old disciplinary record has slipped from public view.