Kindergarten cop
Thanks to a friend for sending this mind-boggling Palm Beach Post article:
PORT ST. LUCIE—A 5-year-old kindergartner was “voted out of” his classroom at Morningside Elementary on Wednesday when his teacher asked his classmates to take a vote on whether they wanted him in class, police say.
Teacher Wendy Portillo told the boy, who is known to have disciplinary issues, to stand in front of the class that day, according to police.
“The teacher decided to bring him in front of the class and let the other kids tell him what they didn’t like about him, kind of ridiculed him,” said officer Michelle Steele, spokeswoman for the Port St. Lucie police.
Portillo then had the class take a vote on whether to boot the boy out of the class and send him to the principal’s office.
The class voted 14-2 to send the boy out for the day, Steele said.
Yes, this teacher should stop watching so much Survivor. Maybe she should even be fired. But should the teacher face criminal charges?
After conferring with the state attorney’s office, which said the case didn’t meet the criteria for an emotional abuse case, police are not pursuing this as a criminal incident, Steele said.
After conferring with the state’s attorney office? Doesn’t our criminal justice have enough to do? You know, fighting crime?
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May 27th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
This sounds like a KIPP school where they hang a sign around the perp’s neck with the word MISCREANT printed on it.
May 28th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Funny, but when I first heard the story, I thought “Wow, this is emotional abuse!” I cannot believe it doesn’t meet some criteria for emotional abuse.
Can you imagine how the boy must feel? How this might affect him? To be humiliated in front of his whole class?
Yeah, I think the teacher deserves some serious consequences, and ample attention from whatever entity handles these things. What she did was quite serious.
And she should not be allowed to work with children in any capacity.
She committed a serious offense against someone too young to understand what she was doing. That’s horrible.
Janet Beatrice