This seems to be a case of shooting the messenger. The teacher did exactly what she was supposed too. She immediately reported this incident to the principal and he called authorities.
How can a teacher be blamed when two kids disappear for a few minutes in a bathroom? Bathroom breaks were a standard part of my school day. The teacher can’t follow every kid all over the school. Was the teacher supposed to accompany every kid to the bathroom? Who watches the classroom then?
The bigger issues of what those kids were doing and where that behavior was learned seems more important. Did one of them see porn at home? Where they molested at home? Where did this behavior come from? That’s not normal behavior for 5 year olds.
I don’t understand why any action is being taken against this teacher.
My guess is the idiots on the school board want someone to blame for what is essentially a random incident. So they’re hoping to look tough on kindergarten nudity by firing the teacher that “allowed” it to happen.
I hope I don’t have to point out how moronic that argument is. Sad thing is the school board will probably keep their job.
It probably is just a couple of curious 5 year olds. Youth Services needs to check the situation at home and make sure theres no abuse there.
This should have been a non event. Teacher reports the incident and goes back to work. Youth Services does their investigation. Blaming the teacher is just crazy.
Per the article, the bathroom was in the classroom (in my kids’ classrooms, the bathrooms are in the back so the kindergartners aren’t wandering the halls.) That said, if it had been two boys who’d slipped in there unnoticed and one of them had gotten injured in a fight, I’m guess she wouldn’t have been fired. But nakedness was involved, so everyone panic!
It’s noted that the bathroom is actually in the kindergarten classroom. (The kindergarten rooms where I went to kindergarten, 55-some years ago, were like that too.) So it might have been expected that the teacher would be able to monitor who goes into the bathroom at all times.
A bigger :smack: from a certain sensible point of view might be: Big Deal! Kiddies play games like that. Everybody knows they do. It’s hardly likely there were really having sex. Just the usual American Victorian Über-Prüdery here. OMG! Now they’re going to be twisted fornicating perverts for life! Their delinquency had been contributed to!
At least it was a boy and a girl! Heaven forfend it should have two boys!
:rolleyes:
ETA: These sentiments ninjaed, I see, by [del]just about[/del] every post above!
Not to mention, does the average kindergartner** even KNOW what “having sex” really means? Lord knows most little kids get odd notions about what it does and does not entail. One of my cousins thought people have sex by smooshing their belly buttons together, because 1.) she knew belly buttons have *something *to do with babies, and therefore would logically be involved in the making of said babies, and 2.) she’d seen older girls make their Barbies and Kens mime sex by basically rubbing the dolls’ torsos together.
** which is, obviously, why the home environment should be investigated
Kids that young do require closer supervision. Thats why the bathroom is at the back of the classroom. They can get into mischief so darn quick. Turn your head for only a minute and they can get into that bathroom without being noticed.
The poor teacher was distracted with the kids taking that special test. I really can’t see any point in blaming her.
I vaguely remember in kindergarten/first grade my teachers had a teaching assistant helping her. That extra pair of eyes makes all the difference.
The second like says that the teacher was “suspended for allegedly failing to properly monitor the children.” So they are saying she was negligent because she didn’t notice that two children had gone into the bathroom instead of just one at a time, I guess.
I agree with Senegoid and others that this is just panic on the part of the school board. Gotta have someone to blame, and we can’t look cross-eyed at the parents or they will scream at us.
Roddy
What isn’t normal behavior for 5 yo? Getting naked and checking out each other? That’s pretty normal behaviour if you ask me. And it’s probably what it amounted to. Maybe there was even rubbing, who knows?
During the recent years, I guess as a weird result of the pedophile scare, it seems that a lot of people have become extremely worried about children “sexuality” to the point where I’ve read (not on this board) many panicked mothers asking for advice about how to deal with small kids playing doctor and such, generally wondering how to prevent such an awful thing from happening and asking how badly will the child be scarred for life as a result. It seems that we’re coming back to a level or prudishness when it comes to children that hasn’t been equaled since the end of the 19th century (except driven by a different fear).
So, how do we get to a fired teacher? Presumably because when an awful, distressful event like small kids touching each other peepee takes place, you need a scapegoat to burn at the stake to allievate fears and show that you’re taking this very serious matter very seriously and are “doing something” to prevent “show me yours and I’ll show you mine” games and their dramatic consequences from ever happening again.
I believe that the association of the concepts “sexuality” and “children” has become so dreaded that some people have lost all sense of proportions and are picturing two kids getting naked together as pretty similar in consequences to mass toddler rape (call the police, the child protection service, a psychiatrist and cordon off the area). And others who have a more sane view of the (non-) issue probably don’t dare saying anything at the risk of appearing unconcerned by child abuse. Add a healthy dose of “coyer your ass” to the mix, and you get a teacher fired.
Two innocent kids playing doctor doesn’t worry me. I agree it amounts to nothing more than mutual curiosity.
What worries me is some kid that’s seen his dad’s porn dvd’s and wants to act out what he saw. That kind of sexuality 5 year old kids aren’t prepared to deal with.
Huh. When I was a teacher I was occasionally called on the carpet because I wouldn’t let multiple kids go to the bathroom at the same time. Not for prurient reasons, but because I couldn’t teach with everybody out of the room. I’d tell them to wait if it wasn’t “an emergency”.
I was told not letting them go exactly when they wanted was inhumane or something. Then I’d show the principal the line at the john if I just let everybody go and return to doing things my way.
How horrible. I mean, if they’d been playing Army or Cops and Robbers or something else that involves killing other people, that would be OK; any normal household regularly exposes children to that kind of thing. But playing at being a Mommy and Daddy?
The teacher should be fired, the children taken into a proper foster home or workhouse, and just to be safe, the school should be burned to the ground.
Well, when the mommy kindergartener and the daddy kindergartener love each other very much they do a special hug and that puts a baby inside the mommy kindergartener to grow.
I’m sure the fact that they were having “sex” has some sort of bearing here, but let’s not dismiss losing track of two of your kids as something that’s ok. Whether or not that warrants firing depends on the exact details and the teacher’s past history, but certainly it’s something that needs further investigating.
If a teacher was fired every time a student got lost on school grounds, I doubt if you’d have a single staffed primary school in the Western world by the end of the school year. And they weren’t even actually lost - just out of sight.
Bathroom breaks were a standard part of my school day. The teacher can’t follow every kid all over the school. Was the teacher supposed to accompany every kid to the bathroom? Who watches the classroom then?