Morristown Daily Record The state education commissioner sustained tenure charges against a Dover Middle School teacher who allegedly engaged in "inappropriate" communications with an eighth-grade student during the pandemic-related school shutdown, court documents state. Arbiter Carol Laskin supported the actions of Dover School District officials who say Andrew Lota engaged in "conduct unbecoming, constituting just cause for dismissal," while communicating with the 15-year-old girl. Their contact included 163 documented emails exchanged between them from March 18 to April 22, 2020. Tenure charges are not criminal, but rather a step in the removal of a tenured teacher or professor. "Hello, beautiful," he wrote to her in one email on April 2, 2020.