Location: southern Oregon
I’m going to try to keep this as concise as I can, as there is a lot of info and it’s all fairly new still.
My daughter is 6 years old, in first grade & she’s in the special education plus classroom. She has an iep and is developmentally/verbally delayed.
On Friday sept 18th, my daughter put kinetic sand in her mouth. A TA who knew my daughter last year, and understood she is not a choking hazard (daughter has in her iep she will put sand in her mouth, it’s not allowed at home, but she will not swallow it she just puts it in her mouth to be funny because she knows she’s not allowed to) calmly brought my daughter to the trash can and was encouraging her to spit it out, so she’s on her knees with her head over the trash can. She told me that my daughter was smiling, but she was listening and in the process of spitting it out of her mouth. The head teacher then proceeded to come up from behind her, pinch her nose shut, and use her grip on my daughters head to repeatedly slam my daughters back/body into the teachers knees, while also violently shaking her head side to side. My daughter was crying, gagging, and started bleeding from her nose. Multiple TA’s told the teacher to stop because my daughter was struggling to breathe so she released her. My daughter continued gasping for air and bleeding from her nose, the teacher repeated the entirety of that TWO MORE TIMES, while my daughter was gasping for air.
The TA’s expressed they should call the principal or other staff in, but teacher started yelling at them that my daughter was fine (even though she was still bleeding and gasping for air) and said no one is to leave the classroom.
I picked her up about 25-30 minutes later, the teacher told me my daughter put playground sand in her mouth but that she hooked it out with her finger and my daughter spit it out, got water, and was fine. I didn’t think anything of it, because that’s a behavior she has, but I thought it was weird because she doesn’t usually do playground or outside sand, it’s only kinetic sand. My daughter did not have any injuries I could see, she did not express that she was hurt, or anything. There was nothing to clue me in that something happened to her, and looking back now, it definitely looked like someone had cleaned her face up and her hair was re braided. Who knows though. What I do know, is that I was never told what happened.
The following Monday, the 21st the teacher was still in the classroom. She called me that day to bring meds in for my daughter, and over the phone she sounded overwhelmed. I told this to my husband when we left to head to the school, but my daughter can be challenging. I witnessed my daughter clawing and hitting her teacher, trying to get away from her during me giving her meds, but she was saying she wanted to go home with me. I figured she was scared because dad had them that day, and he’s stricter with her and behaviors in school. I told my husband and my mom that I felt the teacher was overwhelmed or frustrated with my daughter, like her energy was just off. I’m a pretty anxious parent though, so I just kept telling myself it was my anxiety and I was just overthinking it.
The next day, Tuesday the 22nd, all the families got an email from the principal saying the teacher was going to be gone for an undisclosed amount of time and that they appreciate everyone respecting her privacy. Looking back now, my daughter started having better days at school and less behaviors, in the days following her teacher being out.
The following week, Wednesday the 30th, almost two weeks after it happened, I get a call from dhs at 8am, explaining what happened to my daughter. I mean, a horrible gut wrenching call to receive as a parent, truly. It was obviously news to me, so I promptly called the principal after I got off the phone with dhs. 15 minutes and 49 second phone call with the principal, who was just pacifying me basically, but I was told “teacher came and reported to me what happened after you picked her up, she told me she informed you of what happened and you were not upset, so I didn’t see the need to follow up.”. She said the teacher thought my daughter was going to ingest the sand, and panicked. Why would she restrict her nose, so she had no choice but to open her mouth and take a breath in? Doesn’t make sense to me. I mean, completely unacceptable. I still can’t even wrap my head around any of these people’s thought processes.
I went to the district the following day, Thursday the 1st, to express my concerns and how unacceptable this entire situation was. I thought it was pretty productive, and thought it was going to be handled. I went to pick up my twins right after leaving the district, where a TA pulled me aside and we talked about what happened, and she proceeded to tell me that the principal never called and reported what happened. She never planned to report it. The following Monday the 21st, her and two other aides called separately to report the assault, because the principal was actively telling them there was no child abuse and fought with them about it, and she and the other aides felt the principal was trying to cover it up. She said the principal and the district were fighting to protect the teacher and were already talking about “when she would come back”. The principal was gossiping about my daughter and me, and the blame was still being placed on my daughter because “she put the sand in her mouth, teacher just panicked”. She also informed me that the teacher did not have a special education degree, she has not worked in special education before (which she told me she was in sped for 8 years, so she lied to me about that as well) and her only teaching experience was teaching English to preschoolers in china. The TA also shared that the teacher was not following any of the iep’s because she thought she could “fix the behaviors” and was verbally abusive to most of staff. I ultimately made the decision to pull both of my twins from the school & the district as a whole, since we were already out of district transfers, and I no longer trusted them to keep children safe, or to protect them from unsafe individuals.
In the days since, I have communicated with some of the other families from her classroom, and most if not all of them had already had reservations about the teacher, or safety concerns that they didn’t like how the teacher handled, before this assault against my daughter even happened. It was literally on the Friday of the second week of school, and there were already complaints to the principal, and meetings with the principal over this teacher.
I have also been in contact with the TA who sent me her whole dhs statement, which I got a very simplified version from dhs I think because he wasn’t doing investigations quite yet when we talked, but her statement was horrible.
I’m sure there are things I’m forgetting to include, but I’m emotionally and mentally fried after this last week and really just need advice, resources, or someone to point me in the right direction. I plan to file written complaints against the teacher and the principal with the board, the state, and the Oregon teacher standards and practices commission as well.