There’s only one word for what happened at Barnstable High School Thursday morning, ouch. The students started it and the art teacher ended it. Now, the unnamed educator is on administrative leave while the investigation unwinds.
Video from Barnstable High School via @SnapMap – A student appears to go after another student, a teacher intervenes & a student’s head is slammed off a filing cabinet in the process. pic.twitter.com/heMV5AlLXV
— Mike Saccone (@mikesacconetv) June 10, 2021
Teacher student take-down trauma
The career of a rookie 8th Grade art teacher at Barnstable High School in the village of Hyannis, Massachusetts, is up in the air after the WWE style move he made to restore order in his classroom.
He obviously had no intention of whapping a student’s head into the filing cabinet but he could have shown more concern after leaving the kid whimpering on the floor. That’s why he’s on out-of-school suspension.
Citizen videographers are everywhere these days. One of the middle-schoolers was quick to hit the record button as one classmate raced after another in a threatening manner. The instructor saw the scuffle and dashed behind to intervene. It wasn’t long before Mike Saccone posted the SnapMap video on Twitter and the whole bizarre incident went viral. The play-by-play as described by the news outlets is priceless.
“A student appears to go after another student, a teacher intervenes & a student’s head is slammed off a filing cabinet in the process.” Another account relates, the adult “grabs the student, spins him around, and takes him down to the floor. In the video, the sound of the student hitting the filing cabinet is audible, as he falls to the ground before he begins moaning.”
District Superintendent Meg Mayo-Brown and BHS Administrator-in-Charge Kristen Harmon aren’t happy to be facing the press. They issued a statement admitting the incident happened “around 8:15 a.m.” The faculty member, they claim, “inappropriately physically intervened in a matter between two students.” He was supposed to let them duke it out. Nobody even had a chance to get bets down yet.
“The teacher exhibited actions contrary to the values and expectations of Barnstable Public Schools, and has been placed on administrative leave.” He’s in big trouble too. “The incident is under investigation and BPS will take appropriate steps based on the outcome of the inquiry.”
En garde!
Student Caleb Jones witnessed the incident from inside the classroom. The two rowdy students were playing around with rulers in art class. “They were fooling around until one hit the other too hard and then it got into something else,” he said. Sounds like they were having a sword-fight. The teacher didn’t seem to notice that.
In these liberal days of being arrested for making a gun with your thumb and fingers, such obviously toxic masculine behavior as a forbidden ruler fight should have been detected by classroom surveillance AI and set off the school alarm sirens. From now on, carrying concealed rulers is prohibited in the classroom.
The highly paid babysitter didn’t get involved until the “altercation escalated.” Everything was fine until the teacher “caught up with him and he grabbed him viciously and like, pulled him over and he went flying into the filing cabinet,” Caleb reports.
He also noted the student who was thrown down “sat on the floor in pain afterwards. He just let him sit there. He got up and he was really hurt. He was crying at his desk for a good 10 minutes until we decided to walk him out.”
He and others helped the stunned student to the nurse’s office. “The teacher was just walking around like it was fine.” Caleb isn’t happy about that. “I think this was terrible. It was not right at all,” Jones insists.
“I don’t like to see teachers do that to my friends.” Barnstable police are assisting the district in its investigation. The student did not appear to have any significant trauma or injuries and was not transported to the emergency room for any additional treatment.
