Prosecutor Elena Mok told the tribunal today the registered teacher faces “various allegations” of “unjustified” physical contact with children at the centre where she worked.
While accusations of smacking, pushing and pulling tamariki in the teacher’s care weren’t “highly serious” acts of violence, Mok said, there was a “pattern” of inappropriate physical contact used.
The teacher, Mok said, accepts she engaged in “some physical contact” with the children on occasions, but says other incidents didn’t happen.
The names of the teacher, the centre and related witnesses are suppressed.
Digging for worms
The prosecution’s first witness was the teacher’s former co-worker, who said she worked with the under-2s.
She recalled sitting on the deck one day looking after two babies and watching the outdoor area. She saw the teacher sitting on a chair, projecting her voice and telling three boys to stop digging for worms.
The co-worker said she knew from previous work meetings that the teacher was struggling with physical pain, “limited” in what she could do and using her voice to get the toddlers to stop.
She said she then watched the teacher get up “several” times to pull the boys away from the dirt by their arms or clothing.
“One [boy] would go then the other would run away. They were making a play of it.”
Out of 1-10, the woman said the force the teacher used to pull the boys away was a “four” and started as “gentle guiding” before becoming more forceful.
From the teacher’s tone and body movements, the woman said she could tell she was getting more frustrated as she watched her “drag herself up” from the chair repeatedly with “pain” in her voice.
At one point, she saw the teacher sweep a hockey stick in a “guiding push” to get the boys away from the hole they had dug.
Then, she said, she saw the teacher smack the boy with an open hand across the bottom.
The teacher’s lawyer Hannah Stuart asked if it was possible the teacher had used her hand to push the child, by the bottom, away from the mud.
“No, she smacked him,” the woman replied.
She also said she frequently saw the teacher putting down two of the boys for an afternoon nap and often heard or saw her yelling, pushing or dragging them back to bed as they refused to lie down.
“They were quite challenging … one would play up … the other would take over.”
‘Rumours’
Stuart said before the alleged smacking incident, there’d been “rumours floating around” the centre that the teacher had been hitting children.
Stuart asked if hearing those rumours had changed the woman’s view of the teacher.
The witness responded that before the mud incident, she had told her manager she hadn’t seen any physical behaviour, but would report it if she did.
Stuart suggested there was no “eruption” from the boy after he was smacked, to which the woman replied: “He ran away. He was sad. I would say he was shocked in that moment”.
Stuart argued that the woman’s interpretation of what she saw, the smack, the level of force, was influenced by her having heard rumours about the teacher smacking children.
The woman replied that because she had seen her “rough handling” children at sleep time she was more “heightened and aware”.
Stuart asked if she was “looking for something like this”.
“Not particularly,” the woman answered.
Before the mud incident, the woman said, she had told her manager that the teacher looked frustrated and tired.
“We just put it down to a back injury [and] that she was in pain.”
The ‘sound’ of a slap
The tribunal heard from another former co-worker who became emotional and cried at the beginning of her evidence as she was nervous.
She reported another situation where the teacher had smacked one of the three toddlers on the leg on a nappy changing table.
“[It was] not hard but it did have the sound you hear if you slap someone.”
Stuart asked if the woman remembered the child was refusing to climb on to the changing station, to which she replied she couldn’t remember.
She accepted the teacher had “reflexively” hit the child on the leg only once.
This contrasted with the woman’s police statement, taken after the incident, when she said the teacher had hit the boy two to three times.
When referred back to her statement, the woman, who struggled to remember, said it could have been more than once.
The childcare centre’s chief executive spoke about the disciplinary process for the teacher, in which she was informed of complaints against her, suspended from work and sent a letter asking her to attend a meeting a few days later.
The letter outlined allegations of unjustified physical contact with children and “emotional abuse” on several occasions.
When asked by tribunal chair Catherine Garvey what the “emotional abuse” referred to, the chief executive said she couldn’t answer as it was too long ago. She had signed off on the letter on the advice and reporting of the centre’s managers and those who had witnessed the alleged misconduct.
The tribunal continues.
Ella Scott-Fleming has been a journalist for three years and previously worked at the Otago Daily Times, Gore Ensign and Metro Magazine. She has an interest in court and general reporting. She’s currently based in Auckland covering justice-related stories.
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