physical pain<\/a>, \u201climited\u201d in what she could do and using her voice to get the toddlers to stop. <\/p>\nShe said she then watched the teacher get up \u201cseveral\u201d times to pull the boys away from the dirt by their arms or clothing.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne [boy] would go then the other would run away. They were making a play of it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Out of 1-10, the woman said the force the teacher used to pull the boys away was a \u201cfour\u201d and started as \u201cgentle guiding\u201d before becoming more forceful.<\/p>\n
From the teacher\u2019s tone and body movements, the woman said she could tell she was getting more frustrated as she watched her \u201cdrag herself up\u201d from the chair repeatedly with \u201cpain\u201d in her voice.<\/p>\n
At one point, she saw the teacher sweep a hockey stick in a \u201cguiding push\u201d to get the boys away from the hole they had dug.<\/p>\n
Then, she said, she saw the teacher smack the boy with an open hand across the bottom.<\/p>\n
The teacher\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, she smacked him,\u201d the woman replied.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey were quite challenging … one would play up … the other would take over.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2018Rumours\u2019<\/p>\n
Stuart said before the alleged smacking incident, there\u2019d been \u201crumours floating around\u201d the centre that the teacher had been hitting children. <\/p>\n
Stuart asked if hearing those rumours had changed the woman\u2019s view of the teacher.<\/p>\n
The witness responded that before the mud incident, she had told her manager she hadn\u2019t seen any physical behaviour, but would report it if she did.<\/p>\n
Stuart suggested there was no \u201ceruption\u201d from the boy after he was smacked, to which the woman replied: \u201cHe ran away. He was sad. I would say he was shocked in that moment\u201d.<\/p>\n
Stuart argued that the woman\u2019s interpretation of what she saw, the smack, the level of force, was influenced by her having heard rumours about the teacher smacking children.<\/p>\n
The woman replied that because she had seen her \u201crough handling\u201d children at sleep time she was more \u201cheightened and aware\u201d.<\/p>\n
Stuart asked if she was \u201clooking for something like this\u201d. <\/p>\n
\u201cNot particularly,\u201d the woman answered.<\/p>\n
Before the mud incident, the woman said, she had told her manager that the teacher looked frustrated and tired.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe just put it down to a back injury [and] that she was in pain.\u201d<\/p>\n
The \u2018sound\u2019 of a slap<\/p>\n
The tribunal heard from another former co-worker who became emotional and cried at the beginning of her evidence as she was nervous.<\/p>\n
She reported another situation where the teacher had smacked one of the three toddlers on the leg on a nappy changing table.<\/p>\n
\u201c[It was] not hard but it did have the sound you hear if you slap someone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Stuart asked if the woman remembered the child was refusing to climb on to the changing station, to which she replied she couldn\u2019t remember.<\/p>\n
She accepted the teacher had \u201creflexively\u201d hit the child on the leg only once.<\/p>\n
This contrasted with the woman\u2019s police statement, taken after the incident, when she said the teacher had hit the boy two to three times.<\/p>\n
When referred back to her statement, the woman, who struggled to remember, said it could have been more than once.<\/p>\n
The childcare centre\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
The letter outlined allegations of unjustified physical contact with children and \u201cemotional abuse\u201d on several occasions.<\/p>\n
When asked by tribunal chair Catherine Garvey what the \u201cemotional abuse\u201d referred to, the chief executive said she couldn\u2019t answer as it was too long ago. She had signed off on the letter on the advice and reporting of the centre\u2019s managers and those who had witnessed the alleged misconduct.<\/p>\n
The tribunal continues.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s currently based in Auckland covering justice-related stories.<\/p>\n
Join the NZ Herald\u2019s Open Justice team for Case by Case<\/a>, a video and podcast series examining the disputes and decisions making headlines across New Zealand. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Prosecutor Elena Mok told the tribunal today the registered teacher faces \u201cvarious allegations\u201d of \u201cunjustified\u201d physical contact with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":648598,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[1117,51,1863,6726,11154,6184,1061,11520,101557,2245,2082,71,37367,51928,15258,6451,65176,111,139,69,1118,5415,312,317817,213,1324,43211,7574,1529,150065,6847,28355,26226],"class_list":["post-648597","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sports","tag-accused","tag-auckland","tag-back","tag-become","tag-begins","tag-childhood","tag-children","tag-colleague","tag-disciplinary","tag-early","tag-for","tag-from","tag-frustrated","tag-increasingly","tag-injury","tag-knew","tag-mud","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-of","tag-playing","tag-says","tag-smacking","tag-sports","tag-stop","tag-suffering","tag-teacher","tag-three","tag-toddlers","tag-tribunal","tag-trying","tag-watched"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648597","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=648597"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/648597\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/648598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=648597"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=648597"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=648597"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}