A group of middle school boys in Rhode Island got fed up with a teacher’s alleged creepy behavior toward their female classmates and started documenting his inappropriate action in a “Pedo Database,” which eventually led to him being placed on administrative leave.
North Kingstown School Department Acting Superintendent Michael Waterman told Fox News Digital that he was first made aware of the teacher’s behavior on April 28 of this year. Waterman found that his predecessor had reviewed complaints against the teacher, resulting in him not being rehired as a coach in North Kingstown public schools.
The next day on April 29, Waterman asked an independent attorney to investigate the matter and placed the teacher on leave.
Complaints had been pouring in about the teacher long before April. Timothy Conley, an attorney representing one of the middle school girls who was allegedly harassed, said the girl’s family made a formal complaint in December 2018, but school system said the complaint got lost.
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A group of seventh-grade boys at Davisville Middle School felt like the teacher’s behavior wasn’t being taken seriously by the school, so they decided to document the teacher’s behavior themselves, in a group message dubbed the “Pedo Database,” according to the Boston Globe.
“I felt bad for [the girls] because sometimes it just seems like it was a humiliating thing,” one of the boys told the newspaper. “He’d play a song and he’d make one of them get up and dance.”
The teacher allegedly flirted and teased the girls, told them to show up “in bathing suits tomorrow,” instructed them to dance, and told one girl to take her shoes off and wiggle her toes.
“Post the [teacher’s] pedo moments and quotes here so we can get evidence,” one boy wrote in the group chat, according to the newspaper.
It was only after Conley sent a complaint to the Department of Justice that the teacher was removed from the classroom in April.
“What should have been happening is, these kids should have known that this wasn’t something that they needed to create a blog about or something to that effect,” Conley told Fox News Digital. “This is something that if it was going on, it should have been reported and dealt with formally, but it’s the opposite.”
An independent investigator is now looking into the allegations and the teacher remains on administrative leave.
