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A North Carolina teacher accused of kissing a 5-year-old autistic student will not face criminal charges, according to the victim's mother.
The unnamed teacher was reportedly caught cornering the girl in a Blythe Elementary School bathroom by another staff member, who reported the incident to administrators, on March 28.
“They didn’t even remove my daughter after, they just left her in the classroom after it happened,” Elizabeth Szumski told the New York Post in a phone interview. “They said they removed the staff member from the classroom and sent her home for the day, but they didn’t contact the police, but that’s all they could tell us. So I called the police.”
The staff member was reportedly removed from the classroom, but not from the school, during the investigation, according to an incident report. Szumski said no charges were filed and the case was dropped altogether because Journey, who is nonverbal, "cannot tell her side of the story."
“I started crying because, like [they] said, she can’t tell her side of the story. Why are you not thinking harder? Why are we not trying to figure out why she had such a hard time going to school?” Szumski said.
Szumski is concerned that the disturbing behavior could continue now that it's gone unpunished while her daughter, Journey, is no longer eager to go to school, instead crying every morning when it's time to leave. Additionally, the mother said she and her husband had met with Journey's teacher earlier in the week to discuss her daughter's alleged change in behavior, at which point the teacher told them they needed to do a better job of acclimating her to a new school.
“I said, ‘There’s nothing wrong with her. In the morning she wakes up very happy, but the moment she sees her backpack is when she has a meltdown. There’s clearly a problem here.’ And they kind of just brush it off,” Szumski said. “She can’t tell me what’s bothering her. I’m never going to know. It’s a guessing game and if I’m not there, I can’t see what’s bothering her. So they’re putting it on me, but I don’t have a problem when she’s with me.”