The vice principal of an IDEA charter school in San Antonio was arrested for punching a 5-year-old child.
Betsy DeVos, when U.S .Secretary of Education, gave the IDEA chain more than $200 million from the federal Charter Schools Program to expand.
SAN ANTONIO – An area elementary school vice principal is in custody and charged with assault after she “lost control” and attacked a 5-year-old student in her office, according to Sheriff Javier Salazar.
The incident happened April 22 at an IDEA elementary school in the 10100 block of Kriewald Road, but the sheriff’s office wasn’t made aware of the situation until Wednesday, April 27.
According to Salazar, a mother told deputies that her five-year-old son, who attends the school, was assaulted by the school’s vice principal, 53-year-old Tara Coleman Hunter in her office..
The child admitted that he became “unruly” while in Hunter’s office and struck her. However, the situation escalated further when Hunter “lost control” and attacked the child, Salazar said.
“This was handled way inappropriately,” the sheriff said during a news conference Thursday.
Hunter punched the child in the face or head and pushed him into a file cabinet, according to the sheriff. This caused the child to develop a bump on his head and bruising.
The child was out of control, but the adult should know how to deal with an unruly child without resorting to physical assault.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I’m not surprised. This is what happens when the staff at charters schools are not held accountable for anything. And that is the reason there are education codes passed by legislatures in each state and some codes by elected school boards, to protect children from adults like this principal who feels free to beat up students because she runs a charter school that legally is allowed to operate outside the codes that Public Schools must follow, codes that mostly protect students and insure they are taught properly.
That is also why I think most if not all charter schools are military style boot camps where children are abused and bullied into submission all the time.
Public schools have bad employees too, as do private schools. I don’t blame all charters for some bad employees.
I just think they’re hypocrites and dishonest because they blame all public schools for every bad employee. They don’t apply the same measure to their schools that they apply to public schools.
There’s a refusal to admit there are ANY problems, ever, with charters, especially the clout-heavy chains like this one who have lots and lots of influential supporters.
There’s no self criticism in ed reform. It’s ALL cheerleading. The failures are buried and the successes are exaggerated beyond recognition.
In a lot of cases they compare public schools, which report employee infractions and discipline, with privately owned and run charter schools, which don’t. It’s transparently nonsense and no serious person would compare “no information” to “required reporting of information” but ed reform does it constantly.
I’ll see an ed reform “analysis” on public school teachers missing work and there will be no comensurate analysis of charter school teachers missing work because the charter information isn’t reported and doesn’t exist.
One of the reasons charters like to call themselves “public” is so that when a negative incident occurs, it can be tagged as a problem with a “public” school.
Positives are exclusively spun for charter schools.
I saw one ed reform “analysis” that compared ALL incidents in public schools – anything that had to be reported- so any allegation, any incident, with CRIMINAL PROSECUTIONS in private schools.
Guess which set of schools had more problems? The schools that are required to report EVERY incident or the schools where the only incidents that come to light are criminal prosecutions of employees?
Private schools won by a mile! That the measure was insanely skewed to ensure they won? Not a factor in the analysis.
I think that’s part of the reason there’s so much shock when a private school has a scandal that reaches a criminal level- they do no reporting of any incidents that are less than criminal, so the assumption is it’s all unicorns and rainbows in there until someone gets arrested.
In some urban schools there is a tendency to bring police or private security into schools. These people sometimes have a military or police background, and they have no training in child development. When confronted with an out of control child, some have handcuffed elementary students or body slammed secondary students. If these folks are going to be in the schools, they need better training to safely deal with young people.
Has there ever, once, been a prominent ed reformer who criticized one of their own projects? Say a privatization effort for a whole city like New Orleans or a smaller effort to take over and privatize most of the public schools in Indianapolis? Any criticism or less than breathless claims of success at all?
It’s all super duper A+++ work. Cleveland? HUGE success! Detroit? Has tons of charters so also HUGE success. Youngstown residents, on the other hand, refused an ed reform takeover so they are bad, bad, bad.
They actually have a measure that is taken seriously in ed reform where the ONLY measure is how many students in a given state attend privatized or private schools. High number? Great education. Low number? Bad education. Who are they kidding with this?
Is child abuse more common at charter schools than regular public schools?
Charter schools typically have less experienced staff than public schools. An experienced Vice-principal would have been trained to handle the situation without violence.
What are the incidents of a Vice Principal punching a 5 year old child in a public school that flerp! is referring to? What the incidents of any physical abuse by a high level administrator against a 5 year old child in a public school that flerp! is referring to? I am not familiar with any.
If top level school administrators in public schools aren’t punching 5 year olds, then principals punching 5 year olds is more common at charter schools than in public schools.
Just like suspending extraordinarily high percentages of non-white 5 year old children and when asked about it, invoking the supposedly violent things those many supposedly violent non-white 5 year olds have done, is far more common at certain charter schools than regular public schools. In fact, in NYC, giving an out of school suspension to a 5 year old in a public school is almost unheard of, while a suspension of a 5 year olds in certain charter schools was shockingly common back when charters had to report their suspension rates and excused them by invoking how violent those very young students were.
I do appreciate that in NYC, the charter administrators who want the public to believe that their charter just happens to have an extraordinarily high percentage of violent 5 year olds don’t punch the supposedly violent 5 year olds and instead just give the supposedly violent 5 year old children out of school suspensions. I imagine most people who believe the lie that an extraordinarily high percentage of the 5 year olds in charters act out violently would want the supposedly violent 5 year olds in charters to be given out of school suspensions and do not support punching them.
But a quick answer to the question of “Is child abuse more common at charter schools than regular public schools?” is yes, given the high suspension rates for the very youngest kindergarten students.
Because unless you believe the absurd (and racist) innuendo that an unusually high percentage of 5 year olds who attend charters with virtually no white students happen to be violent children, then the only reason so many 5 year old children would supposedly act out violently is that they are reacting to emotional and psychological abuse from their charter teacher or administrator. Of course charters could just be lying about how violent those 5 year old students they suspended really are, and thus it isn’t that child abuse is more common at charters, but blatantly lying to disparage 5 year old children to get them to leave their school is more common at charter schools.
Salient points, NYC, especially your 3rd paragraph and final sentence.
Your skills are impressive. If I observed a lawyer that reasons as you do and if I needed representation, I’d hire you.
Read how Shavar Jeffries lobbies against regulation of the federal charter school program without mentioning the part of the regulations that would give non profit charters a scoring edge over for profit charters.
https://edreformnow.org/press/ern-response-to-cardona-comments-on-public-charter-regs/
Just a complete mystery how all of the ed reform “analysis” of these rules omits that part.
Are we ever going to discuss how this “movement” went from assuring the public that the privatized schools they push and promote would be non profits to supporting for profit systems? This isn’t how they sold charters. No one in the public was told running a charter chain would be profitable when they were sold charters to replace public schools.
If ed reformers have abandoned their committment to non profit systems – and they have- they should have to explain how this happened and why the public was told something different than what has occurred.
I don’t want to hear anymore that privatized systems will be “non profits”. It’s not true. They misled the public.
https://edreformnow.org/press/ern-response-to-cardona-comments-on-public-charter-regs/
When I wad first teaching, a student told me to go to a place a Unitarian might not accept as a defined reality. I grew very angry, after which, when I came back to my senses, I apologized to the child and soon thereafter to the parents. They were fine.
Years later, after I had a few years behind me, I had become wiser. An incident occurred when a student was admonished gently to take up a task. She hurled her text to the floor and threw the F bomb on her way out of the classroom. I shrugged and went back to trigonometry. After a time she cooled down. When I had her daughter, the same outbursts led me to believe that the trouble might still be there, so I handled her with kid gloves. We managed to get her to settle down over the years.
The point is, experience is a good teacher. TGA not so much.
Taxpayers are cheated and students and communities are put at risk when the teacher and administrator qualifications required for religious, charter and exclusive private schools (receiving tax funding) are lesser than those for personnel in public schools.
I’m trying to figure out why this was posted. Is there solid evidence that charter school employees are more violent toward students than employees in traditional public schools are? I often see articles on right-wing sites that highlight isolated wrongdoing in traditional public schools as if that is the norm all over the country. It’s not fair to claim that, and neither is it right to imply that charter school employees are unusually violent toward students. A rule that applies to all of us: to remain credible it’s best to only make credible claims.
Generally, charter employees have less experience than public school employees. One would expect an elementary school vice principal to know how to pacify a five-year-old without resorting to violence. Experience matters.
Rick Hernandez says:
“A rule that applies to all of us: to remain credible it’s best to only make credible claims.”
Are you going on record saying that a charter CEO who makes a non-credible claim like “Betsy DeVos has the talent, commitment, and leadership capacity to revitalize our public schools and deliver the promise of opportunity” should lose all credibility?
Are you going on record saying that a charter CEO who defends giving out of school suspensions to extraordinarily high percentages of 5 and 6 year olds — to as many as 17% or even 20% of those very young students in some charters with virtually no white students — by invoking the supposedly violent actions of so many of those 5 and 6 year olds, that charter CEO should lose credibility?
Rick, I hope you don’t find it “credible” that extraordinarily high percentages of 5 and 6 year olds whose parents jumped through hoops to get them into a charter are unusually violent, but say it is not credible to say that a charter school employee is violent?
Rick, I hope you do not exempt charter CEOs from your “rule” that anyone who makes claims that aren’t credible should lose their credibility.
There is no question that the privatizing ed reform cabal has no credibility. Alex Jones lacks sophistication, support from the politicized, conservative religious state conferences, their media and, from billionaire-funded think tanks. Except for that difference, similar to Jones, the cabal creates lies, distorts data and spins false impressions for an audience that big business media delivers to them.