Nora Grace-Flood Photo
Executive Director John Taylor addresses the public at Friday’s live presser, with the school’s attorney and public relations consultant in tow.
Booker T. Washington officially terminated a teacher on Friday after multiple allegations of misconduct against her emerged earlier this week.
According to John Taylor, the executive director of the charter school, a parent sent him images of “a communication” between the teacher and her son on Wednesday.
“After reading it and finding it troubling, I immediately followed up with our human resource director,” Taylor remembered during a late Friday afternoon press conference outside the Hamden middle school. Within “one to two hours,” the teacher had been placed on administrative leave and the matter was referred to the Hamden Police Department. The police are currently investigating.
Booker T. Washington serves roughly 500 students across two locations: An elementary school on State Street in New Haven and the middle school on Circular Avenue in Hamden.
Taylor said that “parents of any student that may have been involved” were immediately alerted on Wednesday, alongside all school staff and the school’s board.
The next day, the school board determined that the teacher — an English Language Arts educator who had been at the school for approximately three months — had violated three of the school’s policies as listed in the handbook. Within 36 hours she was fired.
“We are a close-knit community. We are handling this matter with the gravity it deserves,” Taylor asserted on Friday. “We understand situations like these can reverberate throughout the community, and have lasting ripple effects.” He said that the school plans to “offer counseling to those in the community who are interested in receiving it,” review their hiring practices, and encourage parents to talk with their children about the importance of boundaries and reporting suspicious activity.
Taylor declined to say whether the teacher’s messages were sent directly via text or over social media platforms. He also said he would “prefer not to” say how many middle schoolers filed allegations or were directly impacted by the teacher’s behavior, but said that the ordeal “involved more than one student.”
“Please accept some of our limitations as just furthering our willingness to work with the police but also really trying to protect the kids,” an attorney stated after Taylor spoke at the presser. “We’re talking about children and social media. We really don’t want the identity of the children to come out in any way.”
“On a personal note… the speed with which this happened and the way that the school responded I think is pretty exemplary… literally within a matter of hours the Hamden PD were notified,” the attorney continued. “And that isn’t always the storyline in situations like this… I think the students and parents should take a lot of comfort that there’s that level of vigilance.”