The principal and founder of a charter school in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was suspended after he allegedly locked a 5-year-old child in a closet to punish her for “being bad.” It was the twelfth day of school.
The principal of a Baton Rouge charter school is accused of punishing a 5-year-old girl by locking her into a school closet where she said spiders and roaches crawled over her, according to police.
Shafeeq Syid Shamsid-Deen, the principal and founder of Laurel Oaks Charter School, at 440 N. Foster Drive, is wanted on counts of cruelty to a juvenile — a felony — and false imprisonment, according to an arrest warrant issued Monday by Baton Rouge police.
Police say Shamsid-Deen, of 999 N. 9th St., has been in touch with authorities through his attorney, but as of early Wednesday night, he had not been booked.
In a statement, the chairman of the school’s board of directors said Wednesday that Shamsid-Dean has been suspended pending its own investigation.
According to the warrant, a teacher heard a child screaming and crying inside the school Aug. 22. After two other teachers joined in the search, the 5-year-old girl was found inside a closet in the school’s cafeteria. The closet was locked from the outside.
No one was around the closet when the teacher found the child locked inside it, police said.
The child told investigators that Shamsid-Dean, 31, told her to “go into the closet with the spiders, and if she screamed, he would turn the lights off,” the warrant says. The child also said the closet “stinks” and “it has spiders and roaches in it that crawl on her.”
The child told investigators she had been in the closet a long time so she started screaming.
The kindergartener said that Shamsid-Deen “puts her in the closet when she is bad,” according to the warrant.
Aug. 22 was the 12th day of the school year. The girl was just starting kindergarten at a school where kindergarten is the earliest grade.
One of the teachers who found the child told police that she was “weeping hysterically” when they opened the closet door. The closet contained paint, other supplies, and a small chair that appeared to have been placed there recently because of its cleanliness, police said.
When one of the teachers emailed Shamsid-Deen with objections about the punishment, he responded that the school “will work to make sure we have a proper time-out area for scholars to reset in the cafeteria,” the warrant says.
The principal is a graduate of the Teach for America program. The chairman of the school’s board of directors is also a TFA alum.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
OMG. TFA sucks.
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How innovative!
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Public schools have a lot to learn from charters
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RFLMAO
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Is this part of the TFA summer training?
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Timeouts for America
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LOL
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Oh please! Locking a kid in a roach infested closet is so overrated. And not very original.
What it’s really appropriate for is locking up principals who are vicious and inappropriate. I suggest locking this particular principal up naked with a roach/rat/water bug infested closet and see how he reacts. Film the whole thing and use the stills to create a series of greeting cards.
Then fill the closet with some type of delicious bromide or moldy blue cheese or perhaps a skunk that has been turned to road kill . . . . . Keep him there for five days and only give him water to prevent dehydration.
Cheer up. The situation is not so bad when you can use it to rehabilitate a rotten principal.
There’s always hope.
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I have a suggestion. Do to that principle what the Vietcong did to some American POWs during the Vietnam War. I talked to one former POW who went through this and he described it in detail.
Tie the principal up and lower him or her in a pit filled with human excrement and leave their mouth above the surface so they can breathe and smell what they are soaking in.
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There is no excuse ever to lock a student in a closet, roaches or no.
Never.
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Absolutely, Diane! It’s corporal punishment and not to be tolerated.
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I don’t think this incident says anything about charter schools, really. Every entity of every kind has some bad employees who do dumb or harmful things.
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You, Chiara, are delusional. Says nothing about charter schools? Have you read about KIPP, Democracy Prep or Success Academies? Have you heard the odious “no excuses” phrase? In my book I print the Democracy Prep policy verbatim. They shame, shun and punish.
It is very much equivalent to the Trump phenomenon, where his inflammatory, racist rhetoric gives morons permission to be violent and aggressive. The charter “philosophy” gives similar room for idiots like this to abuse children. Not all are as stupid or cruel, but the charter attitude toward children, particularly children of color, inevitably leads to stories like this.
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Maybe I’m delusional but picking this one employee as a representation of charter schools to me is very much like Campbell Brown insisting labor unions cause child sexual abuse.
I don’t know how she missed the huge scandals in religious and private schools, but I suspect she missed them because linking child abuse and labor unions serves a political agenda.
We’ll have to agree to disagree. One can criticize “no excuses” schools without selecting the absolute worst individuals in them as representative of the whole.
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Well, Chiara, you seem to have missed my point. I didn’t suggest he was representing all charter schools. I stated that the broadly embraced attitudes of charter organizations toward children, enable this kind of abusive behavior. That point is beyond question.
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While this example may be extreme (well, no, not really), it’s logically consistent with the ideology and practices of No Excuses charter schools. We’ve heard dozens of stories of charter school abuses of students over the years, so at this point we should consider them a logical/expected outcome of these schools’ beliefs and values.
Not only is it inconsistent with public school theory and practice (absent the outliers and aberrations) but a public school teacher who tried to pull this kind of abuse would be out of the building immediately, probably in handcuffs.
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And stripped of their license, Michael Fiorillo . . .
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With all due respect—and remembering the old adage that “a fish rots from the head”—this was not just a lowly employee but the principal.
That is to say, the one person, above all others, that sets not just the educational but the moral tone for the entire organization/work unit.
The principal’s actions and words are genuinely disturbing.
That’s how I see it…
😎
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An excellent point.
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I think it says something about the NM Dept of Ed. How does a history/polysci BA w/2 yrs as a TFA 5th-gr teacher become a Policy Program Director for the state DOEd designing a teacher accountability program? OK, perhaps his linked in bio exaggerates & he was really just a grunt learning the ropes of implementing ed policy. Even worse if so; after just 3 yrs of that, he’s approved as founder & principal of a fledgling charter, in charge of 46 kindergartners? (They added 1st graders the following year). Looks like n accident waiting to happen.
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Usually I agree with what you have to say, but this time I just can’t. It’s happening all too often. Last year in Prince George’s County, MD, there was so much abuse that they lost their HeadStart funding for several years. In 1 instance a teacher made a 4yr old mop up his own urine because he had wet himself during nap time. That was just one of the worst ones…..there were many more. PG County along with Baltimore City have the majority of Charter schools in our state. I don’t know if these abuses happened in charters, but I am inclined to believe so since our state has a very strange public/charter arrangement.
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WTF is wrong with these people??
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Loose — or more likely, missing – screws.
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This made me want to cry. An hour ago I dropped my 6 year-old granddaughter at school. If this happened to her, we would not have lawyers or an investigation. We would have a principal encountering a grandfather who would have to use all the restraint at his disposal to remain non-violent and, quite possibly, not succeed. I hate to reveal my vestigial rugby player facet, but there are a few situations where no other response seems adequate.
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“Closets For Scholars”
Closets for scholars
Spiders for kids
Roaches for hollers
“Timeouts” in kripts
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Crypts
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SomeDAM poet you are really good at this.
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Somebody has to do it, right?
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2 years ago we had a new principal in the elementary school who was a thief. They caught it quickly- she had been in the job less than 2 months when the discrepancy was spotted, and she was prosecuted.
So it might say something about management. My opinion is they wanted younger principals and she was pushed up too fast, partly because she had a good line about “innovation” and used all the fashionable phrases, but it also might mean she’s just a thief and was a bad hire.
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OK, let’s hear someone defend this as good pedagogical practice….
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Given that there were spiders and a kid involved, I believe one could make an argument that this is good arthropedillogical practice.
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Nice, SomeDAM, seriously!
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LOL. Nice.
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This is the Summit/Facebook program all of ed reform is enthusiastically cheerleading:
“In exchange for the free services, partner schools are testing how the platform works in a variety of settings, adapting it to their needs, and sharing their improvements. About 70 percent of participants are traditional public schools, 25 percent are charters, and 5 percent are private schools, said Lizzie Choi, chief program officer at Summit, who runs the SLP. There are pilot schools in 27 states, from Rhode Island to California. Some serve prosperous communities, others enroll primarily immigrants, and a few serve only special-needs students. Summit started with 19 partner schools in 2015–16 and added more than 100 new schools the following year. Typically, schools begin by implementing the Summit model at a single grade level, then add another grade the following year.”
If whole districts adopt this experiment, and some of them seem to be doing that, how is this “experimental” or even ” a choice” for public school families?
They’re pushing this as “free” but of course it’s not free. Nothing is free. Your time and your student’s time HAS VALUE. Upending your district to adopt this experiment COSTS. Choosing one avenue to pursue means you’re not pursuing another.
They’re lying when they say “free” and they KNOW better. They sure as heck know better at Facebook. They’re familiar with the concept of opportunity cost.
Think about this. Do a real cost/benefit. Don’t get sold. Treat salespeople like salespeople because that’s what they are. They’re not “bad” or “good”. You don’t have to determine their inner motives.They’re just selling something. Behave accordingly.
http://educationnext.org/pacesetter-in-personalized-learning-summit-charter-network-shares-model-nationwide/?platform=hootsuite
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This is a preview of the future of K-12 education if the Waltons, Koch brothers, DeVos, Trump, Gates, Richard Mercer, Eli Broad, Laurene Powell, Mark Zuckerberg (better known as Suckerberg), and all the other extremist, autocratic, psychos achieve their primary goals to get rid of traditional public education and add to their wealth from public dollars.
What was Thomas Jefferson’s advice when the people of the United States are faced with tyrants that have too much wealth and power – something about nourishing the tree of liberty?
The Rise of Antifa might be an example of some American’s taking Thomas Jefferson’s advice to heart.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/the-rise-of-the-violent-left/534192/
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The administrator should be fired, pending due process, of course. The insinuation that this sort of thing doesn’t happen with great frequency in traditional public schools couldn’t be more wrong, as this award-winning 2014 series from NPR/Pro Publica demonstrated: http://www.npr.org/2014/06/19/322915388/national-data-confirms-cases-of-restraint-and-seclusion-in-public-schools
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If public school teachers or principals engage in this behavior, they are fired.
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No one was fired in these Iowa traditional public schools when children were put in seclusion for pouting or failing to trace in pencil.
http://www.thegazette.com/subject/news/violence-usually-triggers-use-of-school-seclusion-rooms-x2014-but-not-always-20160918
Maltreatment of children is bad, regardless of whether it occurs in traditional public schools, charters, religious schools, or elite independent schools.
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Tim,
We know you speak for Eva. Maybe you can explain the racists on her board.
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I can explain the racists on her board. I know Chuck Strauch. $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
That’s the explanation.
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Was it okay when the lead teacher at Success Academy humiliated the 6-year-old by ripping up her paper in front of the other children and sent her to the “calm-down” corner? Seems the teacher needed to calm down.
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The difference between these seclusion rooms and the equivalent behavior that happens in charters like Success Academy (suspending a child, calling the police) is that while they show terrible judgement, the parent has recourse. Do you know why? Because that school system still has an obligation to the student.
When it happens at Success Academy — suspending the child, calling the police, etc. — it is designed to make the child leave. A parent can’t complain because, as Tim likes to point out, it’s just a “choice” and they are free perfectly free to find another “choice” where their child will be welcome.
After all, if only this public school had called itself a charter, the parent would have no recourse except to “choose” another school. And no oversight except a board who said “but the charter gets good scores by using these practices to rid themselves of your nasty, violent, unworthy child so we say “Hooray charter” how about opening another 20 schools? Good job!!!
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First, there’s no mention of whether these “public” schools discussed in your article are charter or real public schools – enquiring minds want to know.
Second, I think there’s a big difference between restraint and locking a kid in a closet with chemicals and bugs. Restraint is unfortunate and should be used sparingly as a last resort, but I can’t say it should be eliminated entirely. What is a teacher supposed to do when a kid is hitting, kicking, biting, self-mutilating, and otherwise presenting an immediate threat to themselves and others? There are ways to use restraint relatively safely if personnel are properly trained (and they should be), but there are no guarantees against injury – after all, the restraint is being used in the first place because the kid is acting out violently. But never, ever, is there call for locking a kid in any room alone, much less a closet, much less forgetting about such kid and leaving the premises without even informing anyone else of what you’ve done.
Incidentally, I have to laugh at the recommendation to use PBIS instead. That’s just a behaviorist system of rewards, and the flip side of any reward is a punishment (“If you do XYZ, you’ll get PDQ” is just the reverse of “if you don’t do XYZ, you won’t get PDQ”, which is a punishment). In my experience working with severely traumatized kids, nothing set them off faster than trying to control them with “rewards”
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You can download the data set used for the reporting here, which lists the traditional public schools and districts that had instances of seclusion and restraint.
https://www.propublica.org/datastore/dataset/restraint-and-seclusion-data
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Tim,
This behavior is identified and sanctioned in public schools. It is abhorrent.
It is a feature in charter schools. Remenember: NO EXCUSES!
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Oh, give it up, Tim. The scale is breathtakingly different. And the main point of many commenting, including me, is that the ideology and rhetoric of the charter movement enables and encourages abusive treatment of children. The fact that other adults also treat children poorly is beside the point (although equally reprehensible).
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“The insinuation that this sort of thing doesn’t happen with great frequency in traditional public schools couldn’t be more wrong”—
Your “insinuations show” argument is as much on, or off, the mark as the “studies show” argument.
An excellent example of the “truthful hyperbole” that characterizes so much of rheephorm’s “fake news.”
A non sequitur does not a logical or fair or helpful point make.
😎
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