A field trip to a local Florida museum is sparking outrage after one middle school student was reportedly choked and slapped by his teacher. Now his mother wants answers and consequences for the adult responsible.
It started when two students got into a physical altercation during a field trip to the Museum of Discovery and Science in Fort Lauderdale. The fight started over a bag of chips, according to WSVN. But after the two students were separated, one teacher appears to have taken things too far.
Cell phone footage taken after the fight shows an unidentified teacher restraining an 11-year-old student named Kendrick. In the video, the female teacher can be heard telling Kendrick “Don’t play with me” as she restrained him on a picnic bench and jumped on top of him.
“She was grabbing my throat. I couldn’t talk. I wanted to get her off me,” Kendrick told WSVN about the incident. The video also shows the teacher holding a cellphone close to the boy’s face and what sounds like her slapping him in the face.
“She choked me and she slapped me,” the boy said. “She was just cursing at me. It hurt a little bit, because my throat felt spicy.”
Now, Kendrick’s mother, Yasmine François, is speaking out over the incident. “You’re a teacher, and this is how you address your student,” she told WSVN. “That’s the language? Is that the vocabulary you use to speak to a kid?”
François said she was at work when she got the call that Kendrick had been in a fight, but what she found most surprising was that no one ever mentioned the teacher’s attack on her son.
In fact, the mother said she took away Kendrick’s phone and prepared to scale back Christmas until a friend sent her the video. “I’m not the mom that’s gonna take sides with my son. Like, if you do something bad, you know, you do something bad, so I’m highly disappointed, because I feel like I was misled,” François continued.
In response to the video, the school district said in a statement, “Upon learning of the video, the district is thoroughly investigating the matter. The employee involved is not scheduled to return to work until January 6th and has no contact with students.”
Because of the fight, Kendrick was suspended from school for three days. The district has opened an investigation of the incident. The principal of McMillan Middle, where Kendrick attends, has since reached out to Kendrick’s mother and told her she had no idea the incident even took place.