DeSoto private school teacher fired after recording captures possible abuse
DeSOTO, Texas (CBSDFW.COM) - A private school in DeSoto fired a pre-school teacher on Thursday after an audio recorder attached to a student's backpack captured the instructor's outbursts in the classroom.
The teacher can be heard screaming at children in the 4-year-old class to "see what happens" if they don't follow instructions. She threatens to let a child "freeze" at nap time, withholding a blanket due to something she said.
One portion of the audio, recorded over several days of school, includes loud slaps. Ra'Kia Waters said her son told her the teacher would hit students with her shoe, although no children can be heard crying out after the noise.
DeSoto police confirmed they have received a report about the behavior and assigned an investigator to look into what happened.
Water said she first approached administrators at DeSoto Private School after a "meet the teacher" event before the school year started. The woman was dismissive, and seemed bothered by the event, according to Waters. Rather than alleviate her concerns, she said they offered to put her son in a class with younger students.
Wanting to keep her son with children his age, she sent him to school, but also reached out to other parents who she said relayed bad experiences from previous years. She said she approached school leaders again, but received a similar response, so she decided to look into things on her own.
"I had to, because I wasn't getting a good enough response from the school, and my son is four. He can only communicate so much," she said.
She attached a small audio recorder to her son's backpack, letting it record over four days, then spent the weekend listening in on her son's week at school, saying she was shocked at what she heard.
Tammy Ashford, the chair of the executive board at the school, said she had the same shocked reaction when Waters played the audio for her on Tuesday.
She said she escorted the teacher out of the building while Waters was still there. After receiving a copy of the recording the next day, she spoke to the teacher and to police. Thursday, the school's board voted to terminate the employee.
"We are committed to making sure we uphold the principles of this school," Ashford said, saying the school welcomed any investigation by police or state agencies.
There had been no previous complaints about the instructor, she said. The classroom where she taught is separated from another room by a plexiglass divider, with an open doorway between the two spaces. The volume of the shouting should have been easy for anyone close to hear, and Ashford said they were looking at schedules to determine if other classes just may have been in other parts of the school building at the times. There are no cameras in the classroom area.
The school, which has been in the community more than 50 years, was also planning an additional in-service day for staff for additional instruction on classroom behavior, discipline and intervention strategies.
