We can all agree that schools should be a safe place where students are free to learn, make friends, and find their purpose.
Unfortunately, this is not always the case.
A mother is now claiming that an elementary school teacher grabbed and kicked her 5-year-old daughter.
The incident happened during a kindergarten class at Bluejacket Flint Elementary school in Shawnee, Kansas.
When her daughter reported to a teacher about the assault, the mother says the school did nothing.
The concerned mother said she picked her daughter up from school Feb. 21, and that’s when she first heard something might be wrong.
She asked her daughter how her day went and and was shocked when her daughter responded: “I don’t like my teacher. She’s really mean. She hit me on my arm.”
That girl’s mother requested not to be identified and did not want to share her daughter’s name.
The only reason this mother says she knows a teacher hurt her daughter, was because her daughter, not the school, told her and there was video to prove what the teacher said happened was a lie.
After noticing a large red mark on her arm, the mother tried calling the school principal but couldn’t get through. She then went straight back to the school to find out what happened.
That was when she learned that her daughter had actually already told another teacher she’d been hit but nothing was done.
According to KMOV4, the mother recorded all of her conversations with her daughter’s teachers and school district staff from that point on.
You can hear the daughter’s IEP teacher talking to the mother, admitting the 5-year-old told her a teacher hit her.
“[The 5-year-old] did mention to me, ‘My teacher, like, hit me.’ I asked her what happened and she said she touched her on her arm but I wasn’t there so I’m not sure what happened.”
After the incident, the mom met with Crystal Smith, the teacher her daughter accuses of hitting her.
She tried to blame the child for what happened and uou can hear Smith say the following:
“So, I’m not surprised she has some marks on her. She was crawling in the bookshelf. She has a red spot on her arm. And I’m not surprised because she shoved herself into that bookshelf … I mean, she kicked me a couple of times. She was reaching over into the bookshelf pulling books out and there were those metal, metal book divider things … I said, ‘Don’t, we can’t do that.’ So I put myself kind of standing around her so that if she does throw something she wouldn’t break something …”
The mother pushed for more information and found out there may be video of the incident. The school soon confirmed that a video actually existed.
“When I saw the video it was heartbreaking, because everything she said, she sat at the same table as me and just lied about everything … she lied to me. She lied to everyone else. She was almost really convincing,” the mother told KCTV5.
The kindergartner’s teacher described a violent 5-year-old thrashing around, throwing books, kicking her teacher, but the footage shows something very different.
That caused worries about not only her daughter’s, but other students’ safety.
“I said, ‘OK, had my child not said anything to me, you were just going to go behind closed doors and speak to everyone else, and if something came up then you’d let me know? But had she not said anything to me it all. I may not have ever known,” she said.
The Johnson County District Attorney’s Office is reviewing the case to determine whether to press charges but but the school has already acted.
The Shawnee Mission School District issued the following statement:
“The Shawnee Mission School District was deeply distressed by the actions shown in the video. We take our responsibility to keep our children safe extremely seriously, and as parents and educators, we are heartbroken whenever a child is not treated with love and respect. As soon as we discovered what happened, we acted to remove the teacher from contact with students, and proceeded immediately to terminate that teacher.”
Thank goodness the child told her Mom and she pressed the issue and got this person fired!
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