Tag: east new york
School allegedly sent badly behaved disabled kids to closet called ‘dark door’
Children called it “the dark door” — a cramped closet where disabled kids in a Brooklyn special-ed classroom were sent when naughty, according to testimony in a teacher-discipline case.
“We’re always put in the closet. That’s where we go when we misbehave,” said one boy who endured the cruel confinement at PS 345 in East New York, officials charged.
One classmate was put in the closet “to let the rats eat him … because he is a monster,” the boy told administrators.
“Sit down, sit down and go to the dark door,” another boy said kids in the kindergarten/first grade class were told if they acted up.
An investigation by the city Department of Education concluded that teacher Sherri Edwers, 30, directed or authorized a paraprofessional to shut kids inside the dark closet as punishment.
The scheme — which sounds a bit like “Matilda” headmistress Miss Trunchbull locking wayward students in “the Chokey” — could “instill an atmosphere of fear,” DOE officials argued.
The DOE sought to fire Edwers, who denied the charges.
But after a six-day administrative trial, hearing officer Mary O’Connell found the tenured Edwers guilty only of negligence, spared her job, and slapped her with a $4,000 fine.
The shocking allegations came to light on Dec. 22, 2016, when Assistant Principal Stacia Mason and an instructional expert made an unannounced visit to Edwers’ classroom, where she taught a dozen children, ages 5 and 6, with physical and emotional disabilities.
When the administrators walked in, Mason “had a feeling something was not right, but she could not put her finger on it,” O’Connell reported.
Edwers was seated on an alphabet rug with students, but the paraprofessional, Sachia Gaffney-Sharpe, was behind a smart board next to the closet.
Gaffney-Sharpe opened the closet door, and pulled a boy out by his hand, the instructional expert, Mia Williamson, testified. The closet, crammed with supplies, was dark, and the boy said he had been sitting cross-legged behind the door.
Mason said the boy then sat down by a radiator — “curled up in a ball.”
Edwers claimed the boy had tossed a pencil into the closet, and went inside to get it. But Mason argued that would be impossible because the closet was blocked by a smart board.
The principal questioned the child, who seemed “drugged up” by medication but confided that Sharpe-Gaffney had put him in the closet “for being bad,” the report says.
The boy said he didn’t cry or bang on the door.
In her hearing, Edwers insisted she never told Gaffney-Sharpe to lock kids in the closet, and wasn’t aware if she did so. Gaffney-Sharpe was suspended for two weeks without pay.
Edwers testified that some of her students had a tendency to make up stories or lie. She also said the boy found in the closet that day “was trying to stab another student with a pencil” — a claim she hadn’t made to DOE investigators.
Hearing officer O’Connell concluded that Edwers, even if she didn’t order it, improperly let a student go into the closet. The $4,000 fine will ensure the issue “does not repeat itself,” she said.
Edwers, a DOE teacher since 2012, still works at PS 345, and makes $73,112 a year. DOE spokesman Doug Cohen called her behavior in the closet case “completely unacceptable.”