A principle and another school employee have been fired after a 4th grade student at Palm Elementary School in Lorain, Ohio told her mother that she was forced to eat out of a trash can. Latasha Williams alleges that her daughter threw away the waffles she was eating in the school cafeteria and was then told to remove them from the trash can and eat them in front of her classmates. The school district is now being sued over the incident.
School makes 4th grader eat out of trash can
The mother told reporters that her daughter said that she disliked the waffles she was eating in the cafeteria and threw them into a trash can.
A school employee, presumably offended by the waste of food, soon told her to remove the waffles from the garbage with a paper towel.
The 4th grader claimed that she was then told to eat the remainder of the waffles in front of her classmates, an act lawyers suing the district claim was meant to degrade and humiliate her.
Latasha Williams further claims that the district did lasting harm to her daughter, who she says became physically ill after the incident and has been afraid of going to school.
The lawsuit, unsurprisingly, is demanding payment from the school district in addition to an admission of wrongdoing and a pledge to prevent similar incidents in the future.
The district promptly launched an investigation and suspended the accused employee and the principle, ultimately firing both after reviewing the available evidence, which included video footage from a camera in the cafeteria.
Lawsuits begin
There are several implications from this story which move beyond the minor offense of an elementary school student being made to eat food from a trash can.
It’s an unfortunate reality that there is no shortage of bad apples employed by public schools in the United States and that higher-ups often fail to catch and remove them.
The employee in this instance evidently enjoyed being able to abuse a position of authority over elementary school students; now the entire district will pay for having hired her.
It’s not surprising that the mother would want to sue but it does seem slightly opportunistic on the part of the lawyers who leapt at the opportunity. The school district promptly fired the offending employees and profusely apologized for the incident.
What more will Latasha Williams and the civil rights lawyers get out of suing the district? Money, of course. Money that ultimately comes from taxpayers.
The combination of bad public school employees and a litigious society will once again leave parents and students paying the price.
