A former teacher from San Antonio has been found guilty of official oppression after she told her students to hit their schoolmate for being a bully.
The 44-year-old wanted to teach a 6-year-old boy how it feels to be bullied, so she directed her students to line up and start hitting him.
“It started out as a pat,” Barbara Ramirez, a teacher at Salinas Elementary School, said. “I’ve heard of teachers using excessive force, but never putting students against other students.”
Principal Jeffrey Large was very shocked by the incident. “I’ve never heard of anything like this in my 30 years,” he said. “I’ve heard of teachers using excessive force, but never putting students against other students.”
Ambrose will receive her sentence on July 29. Her lawyer will pursue probation, claiming that she has already been convicted by the media.
The former San Antonio teacher is not the only teacher who has told students to hit a bully. Last month, a Brooklyn teacher got so tired of an 8-year-old student’s bullying that she told his latest victim to hit him in front of the entire class.
The bully started crying after he was hit by another kid. “Well, that’s what you get,” Tamu Francis said.
Francis was also heard telling the boy, “When you act like a dog, you get treated like a dog.”
“The behavior is extremely disturbing . . . At best, it was a horribly misguided attempt to teach a lesson about bullying,” arbitrator Lisa Brogan said. “She exhibited extremely poor judgment and made an enormous blunder by trying to mete out a certain brand of justice for the class bully.”
Francis did not lose her job because she has taught at the school for 13 years with an unblemished record. She was, however, ordered to pay a $10,000 fine.
Do you think Ambrose was wrong for directing her students to hit a bully?
[Image via Yahoo! News]
