A teacher was placed on leave after a group of middle school students who thought him “creepy” kept a “pedo database” about his interaction with girls in their class.
The teacher at the Rhode Island school is now on administrative leave and under investigation, according to The Boston Globe.
Eight boys at Davisville Middle School in North Kingstown began keeping the log after the teacher allegedly gave the girls nicknames such as “sunshine” and “sweetheart” and asked them to dance for him.
One boy, who is now 15, told The Globe that the group had tried reporting the situation but that the students had not been taken seriously.
The teacher even reportedly commented that complaints had been made against him for decades but that no action had ever been taken, stated the newspaper.
The teenager said that the teacher’s alleged actions had made the girls in his class uncomfortable.
“Sometimes they’d laugh. Sometimes they just kind of just sit there awkwardly,” the youngster said.
“Even the ones that said he was ‘creepy’ laughed because they were obviously not trying to tick him off or anything. So they’re just fake laughing, awkwardly laughing.”
The class began making notes of the unnamed teacher’s behaviour in January 2021 using the Discord social media platform.
The boy told the newspaper that he had felt bad for the girls in the class as “sometimes it just seems like it was a humiliating thing.”
And he added: “He’d play a song and he’d make one of them get up and dance.”
According to The Globe, the teacher was escorted from the school in April, with officials saying that he was under investigation for allegations he had stalked a preteen middle-school girl and been inappropriate towards others.
When members of the public were asked to come forward with information, one of the boys in the class told his mother about the Discord channel and they contacted a lawyer for the girl’s family.
The Globe says that the log has been shared with the US attorney’s office, the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families, the state education department, and a lawyer leading an investigation for the school.
