OK, this is not something that happened to me, but to my sister. Nonetheless, it made me feel very upset. It all happened last week, but only now I heard of it.
My sister lives in Spain (in the city of Albacete), and has a daughter not yet 3 years old. In the Spanish educational system kids begin attending “pre-school” in September of the year when they become 3 (my niece was born on Dec. 24, so she is not yet 3 anyway).
In any case… After their (rather short) day at the pre-school ends, the kids (each wearing a kind of tunic in different colours for each class, allowing for easy identification of which class does each kid belong to) are made to form a line by their teacher and, holding hands, are led outside for their parents to pick them up.
Well, this past October 1st, my sister went to pick up her daughter at the gates of the school… and she was nowhere to be seen (!!)
She was not with the rest of her class!! The girl was lost, the teacher (whose responsibility was to keep track of the kids in her class) suddenly realized that she didn’t know where the child was… Cue frantic searching around the school and my sister being subjected to creeping despair.
Twenty minutes they spent looking for the child (I cannot even begin to imagine what must have been running through my sister’s head during that time). In the end, luckily, they found my niece: She was in the school’s eating room. By a stroke of good fortune an orderly saw her and, not being able to find her teacher (they were at that time looking all over the place) kept her company in a room which the orderly knew was going to be visited by all the teachers soon.
Now… What really makes my blood boil is that the teacher in question did NOT apologize to my sister, refused to accept responsibility for the incident, and later (when my sister complained to the director of the school) made an affidavit in which she wrote that my sister was doing nothing but hysterically insult her while she was worriedly looking for the child. Which I know for a fact is very very improbable --my sister is the kind of person who, in a crisis, will feel horrible inside but will focus on the task at hand.
Also, there the teacher says that the child is ungovernable and impossible to control. That, I don’t know (I live far from my relatives and I haven’t spent enough time with my niece to really get a handle on her personality first hand)… However, that doesn’t detract from the fact that (in my opinion) the teacher failed egregiously in fulfilling her obligations.
And what pisses me off is that she appears to be going down the road of “blame everybody but me”. This… This is (in my opinion again) unprofessional and very, very underhanded.
I don’t know what will happen now (my sister and her husband filed a formal complaint with the education authorities)… But I can’t help to feel really upset. And I can’t help running “what if?” scenarios through my head involving horrible fates that might have befallen my little niece.
Thanks for letting me vent!
