Fight video leads day-care teacher to jail

A former teacher at Playtime Preschool on the East Side was sentenced Monday to three weekends in jail on 14 counts of child endangerment.

The charges came after Chavay Jessie, 31, recorded a video of children fighting on the school’s playground and did not intervene to stop them. Franklin County Municipal Judge Jarrod B. Skinner sentenced her to 180 days in jail, suspending 171 of the days. He also imposed a $200 fine, two years of probation and the requirement that she complete a parenting class.

Skinner said his suspension of much of the jail sentence was due to the amount of support shown to Jessie — who also goes by Chavay Williams — and what that said about her character.

“I don’t think you’re a bad person,” Skinner said. “But I think you made a horrible mistake.”

The video was posted to Snapchat, prompting Columbus Police to begin investigating the incident on June 14, 2018. In the video, children can be seen running around and screaming, with some hanging from a 6-foot wooden fence and others coming to blows. Two children hit each other with shoes, a girl swings her jacket at another child and others can be seen kicking or pushing.

Jessie, who was convicted in June, and her defense attorney, Sallynda Rothchild Dennison, maintained that Jessie went inside the school shortly after taking the oneminute video.

She admitted in court that she added smiling-face and boxing-glove emojis to the video, but she continued to say that she does not know how the video got on social media.

Skinner said the emojis and video were not necessarily the heart of the issue. Rather, they were “icing on the cake.”

“You’re a child-care provider. The fact that you didn’t do anything is the problem,” he said.

Joe Gibson, the city’s deputy chief prosecutor, echoed that in his remarks at the sentencing hearing, saying the only way for Jessie to “get it” is to have a sentence involving jail time.

“The theme coming from the defense in this is that this isn’t that big of a deal,” he said. “This is a serious case. What she did is bad.”