News
Parents Wire Kids to Prove Their
Teachers’ Classroom Abuse
By Geoff Mulvihill
The Associated Press
“For the tiny percentage of teachers that do it, I hope
that they live in fear every day that a kid’s going to walk
in with a recorder,” he said.
He gives just one caveat: “Make sure it’s legal in your
state.”
Laws on audio recordings vary by state, but in most of
the U.S., including New Jersey, recordings can general-
ly be made legally if one party gives consent. Over the
past decade, courts in New York and Wisconsin have
ruled that recordings made secretly on school buses were
legal, finding that there is a diminished expectation of
privacy for drivers on the bus.
The recordings have led to firings in several states,
criminal convictions of bus employees in Wisconsin and
New York, and legal settlements worth hundreds of thou-
sands of dollars in Ohio and Missouri.
Even if it is found to be legal, the recording could have
a chilling effect on classrooms, says Giuliani, of the spe-
cial-education teachers’ group. Teachers could worry
that every one of their words could be monitored. And a
recording could be edited to distort the teachers’ meaning.
He said that the rise of the secret recordings suggests it’s
time to discuss a way to make sure the most vulnerable chil-
dren are not being mistreated in a more formal way.
“In classrooms where children are nonverbal, unable to
communicate, defenseless,” he said, “we should start to
have a discussion of whether cameras in the classroom are
Damien Ntawumpora, a senior at Portland
Lutheran High School in East County, has won a
Black United Fund of Oregon scholarship to
Concordia University. He and his family will be
honored at a luncheon Thursday, April 26 at the
Governor Hotel, as well as at a Habitat for
Humanity breakfast Wednesday celebrating
families who are or soon will have Habitat homes
underway. Damien and his family are refugees
from war-torn Burundi who immigrated to the U.S.
just a few years ago. Ntawumpora attends
Portland Lutheran, a private college prep school.
He plans a career in the health field, and hopes
to eventually return to Burundi to use his skills
there. Combined with other grant money, this
award covers almost all of Damien’s college
expenses.
necessary.”
That’s a move that the National Autism Association’s
Fournier also says is needed.
AP News Researcher Jennifer Farrar in New York con-
tributed to this report.
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CHERRY HILL, N.J. (AP) — Teachers hurled insults
like “bastard,” “tard,” “damn dumb” and “a hippo in a bal-
lerina suit.” A bus driver threatened to slap one child, while
a bus monitor told another, “Shut up, you little dog.”
They were all special needs students, and their parents all
learned about the verbal abuse the same way - by planting
audio recorders on them before sending them off to school.
In cases around the country, suspicious parents have been
taking advantage of convenient, inexpensive technology to
tell them what children, because of their disabilities, are not
able to express on their own. It’s a practice that can help
expose abuses, but it comes with some dangers.
This week, a father in Cherry Hill, N.J., posted on
YouTube clips of secretly recorded audio that caught one
adult calling his autistic 10-year-old son “a bastard.” In less
than three days, video got 1.2 million views, raising the
prominence of the small movement. There have been at
least nine similar cases across the U.S. since 2003.
“If a parent has any reason at all to suggest a child is being
abused or mistreated, I strongly recommend that they do the
same thing,” said Wendy Fournier, president of the Nation-
al Autism Association.
But George Giuliani, executive director of the National
Association of Special Education Teachers and director of
special education at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y.,
says that while the documented mistreatment of children
has been disturbing, secret recordings are a bad idea. They
could, he said, violate the privacy rights of other children.
“We have to be careful that we’re not sending our children
in wired without knowing the legal issues,” Giuliani said.
Stuart Chaifetz, the Cherry Hill father, said he began get-
ting reports earlier in the school year that his 10-year-old
son, Akian, was being violent.
Hitting teachers and throwing chairs were out of charac-
ter for the boy, who is in a class with four other autistic
children and speaks but has serious difficulty expressing
himself. Chaifetz said he talked to school officials and had
his son meet with a behaviorist. There was no explanation
for the way Akian was acting.
“I just knew I had to find out what was happening there,”
he said. “My only option was to put a recorder there. I need-
ed to hear what a normal day was like in there.”
On the recording, he heard his son being insulted - and
crying at one point.
He shared the audio with school district officials. The
superintendent said in a statement that “the individuals
who are heard on the recording raising their voices and
inappropriately addressing children no longer work in
the district.”
Since taking the story public, Chaifetz, who has run
unsuccessfully for the school board in Cherry Hill and
once went on a hunger strike to protest special-education
funding cuts, said he has received thousands of emails.
At least a few dozen of those he has had a chance to
read have been from parents asking for advice about
investigating alleged mistreatment of their children.
It’s easy, he tells them.
“It was a simple $30 digital audio recorder. I just put it
in the kid’s pocket,” he said. “Unless they’re looking for
it, they’re not going to find it.”
With more parents taking such action, he said, fewer
educators may get out of line with the way they treat stu-
dents who cannot speak up for themselves.
College Bound
April 25, 2012 The Portland Skanner Page 7