B.C.’s Commissioner for Teacher Regulation has disciplined four teachers for behaviours involving unprofessional behaviour where children were exposed to sexualized situations or allegedly abused.
In one case, a child was put in a garbage can while in another, students watched violent, sexualized films.
Commissioner Howard Kushner found Abbotsford Grade 12 teacher Justin Thanh Dat Hung showed students a video called “This is What the Life of an Incel Looks Like.”
(The term, ‘incel’ is short for "involuntary celibate," an online community of men considered by many to be a hate group who say they’re not having sex because of women and often encourage rape, murder and other violence against women.)
Kushner said the video showed “cartoon-like, sexually explicit images of women as sexual objects, and images of men having violent sexual encounters with women. The text accompanying these images is derogatory and demeaning of both women and men.”
He said the video included discussions of two famous ‘incels’ who went on to commit mass murder.
Kushner said in the decision Hung did not watch the video beforehand, a breach of district policy.
In June 2019, Hung was suspended without pay for five days.
Hung admitted the conduct and accepted a reprimand.
In a Â鶹´«Ã½Ó³»case, Kushner found elementary music teacher Rickie Lee in October 2018 gave an entire Grade Four class a detention for not listening and talking while he was talking.
Lee yelled at the students and made them sit against a wall using their legs for support for two minutes.
Kushner said Lee was aware some were in discomfort. One student began to cry and was left with a welt on her back.
Lee received a letter of discipline.
In another incident, Kushner said, a student was crouched talking to another student. Lee pushed the student, causing her to fall, laughed and left. When the other student asked why he had done it, Lee flipped her upside down and put her head in a garbage can. When she asked why he had done that, he again picked her up, holding her by her thighs and neck and spun her around. As he put her down, his hand touched her crotch.
In a third incident, Lee was outside his classroom in February 2019 while he was supposed to be teaching. Two Grade Seven students walked past and he picked one up and placed him in a crib. When the student asked why, Lee responded with a gesture mimicking a child sucking its thumb.
Fourth, in March 2019, Lee flipped a Grade Three student upside down and pretended to put them in a garbage can.
Kushner said on many occasions, Lee would body check, shove, kick or use his body to block them. One student reported a shoulder injury.
On April 3, 2019, Lee was suspended for one day without pay. He has since attended counselling sessions.
Kushner said Lee admits the misconduct and agreed to a three-day suspension.
In a case anonymized to protect a student’s identity, Kushner said a teacher in 2017 sent 2,496 text messages to a student saying the teacher loved them, making flattering remarks, discussing the student’s sexuality and sexual orientation, and sharing personal information.
The student’s mother asked the teacher to stop but the behaviour continued. When the student expressed a desire to harm themselves, the teacher attempted counselling via text contrary to district policy.
The teacher was suspended for two months without pay, transferred to another school and mandated to take a course on respectful boundaries.
Kushner said the teacher agreed to a two-month and two-day suspension.
In another anonymized case, a middle school teacher in the 2016-2017 school year made personal comments about a student in a class, told the class untrue personal information about a student’s family, made comments of a sexualized nature to the class and had inappropriate physical contact with students.
The teacher agreed to a reprimand and was required to take the respectful boundaries course.
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