Education Council stands by decision

He didn’t really talk about school, and just became more withdrawn. He was not happy, and not achieving.

Concerned mother

The Education Council is defending its decision not to discipline a teacher for taping a child to a chair because it was ‘‘a joke’’.

The teacher governing body cleared Cheryl-Lyn Porter of misconduct after it received a complaint about ‘‘an issue’’ from Christchurch South Intermediate School in May.

A mother, whom The Press agreed not to name to protect her son, said the boy was sticky-taped to his chair in Porter’s class in mid-2013. It is understood this was one of the incidents investigated.

The mother said the investigation was ‘‘unjust’’, since the Education Council never once contacted her to hear her son’s side of the story.

‘‘She might have thought it was a joke, but we certainly didn’t, and [her son] certainly didn’t.’’

She still ‘‘felt sick to the stomach’’ that Porter could continue teaching.

The council, which has previously refused to discuss details of the case, did so yesterday to defend its decision as ‘‘correct and appropriate’’, interim chief executive Julian Moore said.

‘‘As far as the incident is concerned, the teacher reported that the child was disruptive and the teacher said, as a joke, ‘settle down otherwise I’ll have to tape you to the chair’.

‘‘The class thought this was funny, and so did the child.’’

The child was ‘‘complicit’’ in helping the teacher tape him to the chair and it was seen as a joke, he said.

‘‘The CAC [Complaints Assess- ment Committee] does not regard this as good behaviour of the teacher, but neither does it regard this behaviour to be something that needed to go further than the CAC.’’

It was not appropriate to interview the parent, as they did not see the incident and did not hear about it until a month later, he said.

The 11-year-old boy and his mother told Fairfax that in front of a class of about 26 pupils, Porter wound tape around him and the back of his chair, then up and around his head. The teacher ripped the tape from his head, taking some of his hair off with it and left him to struggle his way out.

He said it ‘‘got worse’’ when it got in his hair.

The mother said she only found out about the incident when she ‘‘had parents coming to me because their children were so concerned about [her son]’’.

‘‘He didn’t really talk about school, and just became more withdrawn. He was not happy, and not achieving. When he did break down, he was sitting on my lap and he cried and cried and cried.’’

A classmate who witnessed the incident said it began as a joke but quickly stopped being funny as Porter became angrier and kept winding more tape around the boy.

Former Principals’ Federation president Phil Harding said not carefully listening to both sides of a complaint was ‘‘not a safe way to form a view’’.

‘‘In my experience of my investigations of many issues from serious to trivial, every one has been changed by hearing the other side of the story.’’

Taping a child to a chair was humiliating and potentially very unsafe, he said.

Moore said the council put students and student safety at the centre of its investigations.

‘‘Our record of dealing with real threats to student safety is clear. However, this was not one of those cases.’’