INQUISITR.COM / News & Politics

Substitute Teacher Allegedly Taped Middle School Students To Desk Chairs

By Robert Jonathan
Published on: 08:23 PST, Dec 5, 2016

A substitute teacher in South Carolina allegedly used tape to restrain two male students at their desks in the Lexington, South Carolina, area.

One of the students at Sandhills Middle School in the town of Gaston where this incident reportedly took place also allegedly had his mouth taped shut, cops claim.

The substitute teacher in question, who was arrested by sheriff’s deputies on Saturday morning, faces two misdemeanor counts of cruelty to children.

The school alerted authorities to the allegations that the students were bound with tape, and cops began an investigation, the State noted.

A news release from the Lexington County Sheriff’s Office explained what allegedly happened in the South Carolina classroom incident.

“Janeen Suzette Clark, 26, taped two male students to their desk chairs and bound their hands with tape during school hours Thursday, according to arrest warrants. She was in a classroom at the Gaston school serving as a contracted substitute teacher at the time of the incidents. Clark put tape over the mouth of one of the students and allowed another student to tape the second victim to a chair, according to arrest warrants.”

There is no word yet on what kind of tape was allegedly used, duct tape or otherwise.

Law enforcement authorities released the substitute teacher from the Lexington County Detention Center later on Saturday on her own recognizance. Upon a conviction in a court of law, cruelty to children is punishable by $200 maximum fine or up to a month in jail, according to CBS affiliate Live5News in Charleston. No court date was included in the news accounts.

“We dispatched a team of investigators to look into this situation as soon as the school made us aware of it on Thursday,” Lexington County Sheriff Jay Koon explained about the taping allegations. “Our investigation is ongoing and we’re still talking to those who were involved.”

Other forms of alleged misconduct by substitute teachers have been previously chronicled by the Inquisitr. For example, about a month ago, a substitute assistant (and former substitute teacher) at the Big Cypress Elementary School in Naples, Florida, was arrested for allegedly slapping a blind male student across the face, an encounter which was captured on surveillance video. The suspect was charged with battery and no longer works at the school. In late October, a family in Pontiac, Michigan, claimed that their 6-year-old daughter was injured after a substitute teacher at the Pontiac Academy for Excellence picked her up and slammed her to the ground after the child reportedly tapped the teacher on the shoulder to ask her a question. A substitute teacher at Legend Elementary School in Newark, Ohio, was fired in October after he allegedly threatened to cut off the heads of a second-grade class and bury them if they continued to misbehave. The teacher was supposedly making a joke, but school officials deemed them wholly inappropriate and alarming. In August 2015, a male substitute teacher brawled with a belligerent female student in a video that went viral at the time.

On the flip side, as it were, a Houston high school student was arrested in May 2014 on a charge of injury to the elderly after allegedly pushing a substitute teacher to the floor and retrieving his cell phone. Cell phone use during class was prohibited at the school, and the sub had confiscated the 16-year-old’s cell phone, which prompted the altercation.

Leaving aside the facts, accusations, or circumstances of any or all of the above incidents, do you think that, in general, substitute teachers have more to contend with in the contemporary classroom than their full-time instructional counterparts?

[Featured Image by Rashevskyi Viacheslav/Shutterstock]

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