A C.C. Sweeting Junior High School teacher, who spoke to the Guardian on the condition of anonymity, said that on Thursday, while assisting another student with making copies for another teacher, a male 9th grade student came up behind her and pulled her hair.
She said that she took this as an insult because she was wearing hair extensions and the class started laughing.
The teacher said that she spanked him on his hand and told him that he should not have touched her.
“I couldn’t even get back to my lesson because he started to run on…I got to the point where I told him that he needed to leave my class or I would kick him out of my classroom,” said the teacher.
After he started shouting obscenities at her, she continued, she went to his desk and pulled him by his shirt, upon which he acted “like he wanted to fight, and at the same time he pulled away from me and he hit me with his elbow in my left eye. Actually, I didn’t hit him again because I see where this was heading. I grabbed the broom and I called the guidance counselor who was passing by at the same time and I told her to come and get him.”
As she proceeded along with the guidance counsellor and the student to the administration office, she said, she started to explain to the counsellor what had happened, but the now apparently enraged student kept interrupting her.
“You already assaulted me and you have time to run on,” she said she told him, “and I hit him with the broom and he dropped his bag and he came to attack me but the counsellor was in the way.”
She said that the school administrators told her that she should have called them in immediately after the student pulled her hair.
“I could see if I had slapped him, but I just hit him on his hand,” she said. The student’s parents were advised to come to the school on Friday, she said, adding that he had attended school for only half of the term, and was suspected of taking drugs.
“Every time he comes to my class, his eyes are very, very red. Administration said that this boy has some problems and they are dealing with it. I don’t feel like these type of students need to be in the classroom if the problem is not dealt with…if they are not clean…The Ministry needs to have a constant test in place even after they rehabilitate these children. Because they can go right back and resort to the same thing and escalate to the classroom. Students on drugs can’t think straight,” the teacher said.
She advocated that corporal punishment be reintroduced into the school system as a means of disciplining students.
“But even if they put the beating in our hands or not, the time we are in now, if you try to discipline them, they want to fight you,” she said. “We are not really afraid but we don’t have any power; we don’t have any rights. Nothing. And the children know this. I had a teacher come to me and say one of her students said that he wished it was him that I had stood up to, and what he would have done to me.”
Reportedly, there have been several incidences at the school where teachers have been assaulted, including an incident where an administrator was “drop-kicked” by a student.
Mindful that she could get in difficulties as a result of bringing the matter to the press, the teacher said, “The story has to be told. Everybody is so afraid of the authorities but I say what I have to say and I mean what I say.”
BY VANESSA C ROLLE, Nassau Guardian Staff Reporter
