PALM COAST, Fla. – A Florida mother is irate after she said her 4-year-old son’s teacher forced the boy to pick toilet paper out of the toilet bowl with his bare hands after using it.
“The teacher said he used too much toilet paper, and that she made him reach his hand in the toilet and grab out the toilet paper with his bare hands,” Rymfire Elementary parent Tiffany Huffman told WESH. “I always tell him, ‘Do not put your hands in the toilet.’ Even the trash can, I say ‘Do not put your hands in the trash can.’”
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Huffman said her prekindergarten son also told her he forgot to wash his hands, and neither the teacher nor the teacher’s aide involved in the incident bothered to remind him.
“There was cuts on his hands,” Huffman said. “The bacteria, anything, hepatitis, anything can set in on those cuts.”
School officials allegedly told Huffman the teacher was frustrated with her son because he previously clogged the toilet and she had to call the janitor to clean up the mess. The teacher also allegedly told her superiors there was no feces in the bowl, Huffman said.
“There was kids in there using the bathroom, number one. Number two, it doesn’t matter. It was in the toilet at one time and she made him stick his hands in there,” Huffman said. “We’re outraged by it. I don’t feel like she should have children in her care.”
Huffman told News 6 her son’s apparently not the only student who has had problems in the Rymfire Elementary School bathroom.
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“They’ve been having issues with their toilets,” she said. “I guess the children keep clogging them up.”
The Flagler County mother said her son was traumatized by the incident.
“He felt like people were watching him have to do this,” Huffman told News 6. “He was humiliated.”
“It’s frustrating to me because I want my kids to go to that school, but he won’t be going back into her classroom, that’s for sure,” she said.
School officials would not discuss the incident on camera, and instead released a statement claiming to take the issue seriously and supposedly launched an investigation.
Sadly, the Palm Coast incident is at least the second time this year a teacher was accused of forcing a student to sift through the toilet to pull out toilet paper, EAGnews reports.
A mother in South Carolina told NBC 5 in April that her 7-year-old son was also forced by a teacher and paraprofessional at Royal Live Oaks Academy in Hardeeville to pick out toilet paper through his feces using his bare hands.
“He has to live with these decisions from the teacher, taking matters into her own hands and handling the situation that way,” the unidentified mother said. “I feel like they should not just suspend if that’s what happened, they should be fired.”
Veteran 35-year teacher Barbara Clark, who is also the local Jasper County chairwoman, was outraged by the incident.
“I’ve heard of a lot of things in teaching, but I’ve never heard of anything like this,” she said. “I call it exactly how I see it, and that is wrong. I is so ridiculous, and every time I think of it, it makes me sick.”
In the Live Oaks incident, the teacher and paraprofessional denied the allegations, but witnesses called them out, ABC 13 reports.
“It was belittling to the student it happened to, it was belittling to the teaching profession, and it should have been belittling to the teacher who had the young student do something like that,” she said, adding that the teacher should be fired.
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