Mum’s fury as teacher who taped girl of 7 to a chair walks free
A MOTHER whose seven-yearold daughter was Sellotaped to a chair in front of laughing classmates told of her fury yesterday, as the cruel teaching assistant walked free from court.
Rachael Regan, 43, ‘ bullied and humiliated’ the youngster over a fivemonth period, sticking Post-it notes to her thumbs, shutting her in a store cupboard, ripping up a picture of her and making her stand on a chair while she tied string around her legs.
Police were called in after the girl was taped to her seat for up to ten minutes, and ran into her mother’s arms after school with ‘tears rolling down her face’.
Regan was convicted of child cruelty at Bradford Crown Court and was yesterday sentenced to a 12-month community
‘Publicly humiliated’
order with 40 hours of unpaid work. But Judge Neil Davey, QC, said he would not jail her as the Crown Prosecution Service had taken 15 months to decide whether to charge her, and she had faced an ‘appalling’ wait of almost two years before the case came to trial.
The judge told her this period of ‘legal limbo’ had been ‘substantial punishment’, as she lived for months with the uncertainly of not knowing whether she would face prison.
However yesterday the girl’s mother said: ‘I don’t think this punishment fits what Regan did to my daughter.
‘My daughter was humiliated publicly and will remember this for the rest of her life.’
She added: ‘I didn’t pursue this with the police just for the sake of my daughter, I did this as warning for everybody from parents and family to teachers and schools.
‘You should always listen carefully to what your children tell you, because I didn’t believe my daughter when she first told me what happened. I couldn’t believe that anybody could be so cruel.’
During the trial Regan told the jury the girl was ‘fidgety’ and a ‘ cheeky monkey’ who needed Post-it notes to stop her sucking her thumbs.
She also claimed that taping her to a chair was meant to ‘settle her down’ while she was copying from the board.
But the girl’s mother said her daughter had been traumatised by the incident.
She said in evidence: ‘It was so heartbreaking to see her like that because she was so bubbly and outgoing. I’ve never seen my daugh- ter so upset.’ Regan, a former dinner lady and mother of a teenage girl, became a teaching assistant after attaining an NVQ.
She was sacked from her job at the school in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, after the complaint was made in January 2013. She refused to comment after the case.
Yesterday Judge Davey said Regan’s conduct was ‘shameful’ and described her as a bully who had betrayed her position of trust by making the girl a ‘figure of fun’.
He went on to say that the girl, now aged nine, who cannot be named for legal reasons, was ‘back to her old happy, bubbly and extrovert self’. But he added: ‘You were cruelly bullying her.
‘Any such conduct by an adult would be shameful, made more shameful because your victim was only seven years old and in your care.’
The judge also explained that Regan is unlikely to work with children again, saying: ‘You have lost your job, and lost your good name. Having humiliated the girl, you have been professionally humiliated and now publicly humiliated.’
One of Regan’s colleagues, Deborah McDonald, 41, was cleared by the jury of the same offence at the end of last month’s trial.