Teacher faces sack after clash with boy over phone
A WIDOWED teacher is fighting to save her career and good name following a conviction for assault after she clashed with a teenage pupil in a classroom row.
Regina Hungerford, 54, denies the 17- year- old boy’s claim that she hit him for playing a music video on his mobile phone during a lesson.
While admitting she “lost it” and threw the phone out of the window, she insists she did not strike him with a book.
She was found guilty of common assault by magistrates and is now planning to appeal against the conviction so she can continue her teaching career and work with the Girl Guides.
The maths teacher at Merthyr Tydfil College, South Wales, where she has also taught French and German for 14 years, claimed the pupil disrupted the lesson by playing the music video when she appeared before local magistrates on Wednesday.
Her victim told the court he was unsure if she struck him during the incident, saying: “I remember Miss Hungerford swinging the book at me but I can’t be certain that she hit me. What I can remember is her hitting the table while shouting.
“Although I was a bit dazed I was not injured.”
Suffer
The mother- of- two, who has lived alone for eight years since the death of her husband, said she told the boy to turn off the music but he replied: “You can’t make me.”
Prosecutor Hugh David said she then threw the phone out of the classroom window before hitting him with a book and later told the boy’s year tutor she had “lost it”.
Defence barrister Peter Doninson said Hungerford had been a volunteer with the Girl Guides for 25 years and had been the county commissioner for Breconshire in 2006- 7.
He added: “The real sentence she will suffer is not the sentence of the court but the loss of her employment and loss of work with the Girl Guides. She can no longer volunteer in the community and that is a loss to her well- being and the community she supports.”
Magistrates imposed a 12- month community order and ordered her to complete 60 hours of unpaid work. She will also have to pay £ 620 prosecution costs, a £ 520 courts charge and a £ 60 statutory surcharge.
Because she has a criminal conviction she now faces being struck off the teaching register. But afterwards she said she planned to appeal to get the conviction quashed. She said: “This has ruined my life and I want to do my best to overturn this miscarriage of justice.”
A friend said: “She cannot understand how she was found guilty if the so- called victim is unsure whether there was any contact. There is something seriously wrong with the justice system if the conviction is not quashed.”
There is no Government policy on the use of mobile phones in schools in England and Wales. Heads have to set restrictions themselves.
But Tom Bennett, the Department for Education discipline tsar, is beginning a wide- ranging inquiry into how schools deal with unruly children. While smartphones and tablet computers can be useful in some lessons, Mr Bennett will investigate teachers’ concerns that growing numbers of pupils are distracted by their mobile devices.
A recent study by the London School of Economics found test scores rose by an average of six per cent when mobiles were banned from the classroom.
More than 90 per cent of teenagers have mobiles and Schools Minister Nick Gibb has suggested the Government could update its advice to schools to help teachers cope with such “21st century” challenges.