Teacher fined for ordering student to strike back at bully
A Brooklyn teacher got so fed up with a notorious 8-year-old class bully that she taught him a lesson in street justice — having him stand in front of the class while his latest bullying victim “hit him back” for all the abuse.
The kid clocked his tormenter — and the bully cried like a baby.
“Well, that’s what you get,” the teacher told the wild child, according to Department of Education documents.
DOE officials sought to can veteran PS 191 teacher Tamu Francis last year following the incident involving the bully.
The aggressor was on top of his victim throwing punches when Francis pulled him off.
After Francis got the two kids off the ground, that’s when she encouraged the victim to “hit him back,” say students at the Brownsville school.
In addition to making the serves-you-right comment, Francis also was heard telling the boy, “When you act like a dog, you get treated like a dog,” according to the arbitrator who presided over her termination hearing.
Francis denied the whole scenario other than the fight itself, saying that she tried to teach the whole class a lesson by asking the bully, “How would you like it if [he] was to hit you back?”
She says the victim misunderstood her point and got in a quick jab to the gut before she could protect the boy — but arbitrator Lisa Brogan did not find her story credible.
It didn’t help that Francis failed to report the incident to her superiors.
“The behavior is extremely disturbing . . . At best, it was a horribly misguided attempt to teach a lesson about bullying,” wrote Brogan. “She exhibited extremely poor judgment and made an enormous blunder by trying to mete out a certain brand of justice for the class bully.”
But because of the third- grade teacher’s 13 years with an unblemished record, she was hit with a $10,000 fine rather than booted last fall.
Brogan said the fact that Principal Elsi Capolongo allowed Francis to keep teaching after the incident — although in a different classroom — shows that she was not worried about a repeat incident.
The sympathetic hearing officer also noted that “by all accounts, [the instigator] was a bully and had behavior issues.”
A message left at a cellphone number listed for Francis wasn’t returned.
DOE officials said she has been a roving substitute since December.
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