Yesterday evening, the CEO and the chief education officer at the Ministry of Education met with the father of the Canaan student who was preyed upon by her teacher. The minister told us yesterday that he believes the school should have acted with more urgency, rather than wait for an entire week before informing them - the whole time permitting the teacher to remain on campus.
And what puzzled the parent is that this isn't the first time this has happened at Canaan. Recently, another teacher was dismissed for reportedly kissing a student. But he explained to us that when he asked the CEO and the chief education officer about it, they weren't sure they'd heard about that incident before either.
And now the father feels that if the school is "handling" these cases on their own without informing the ministry, then the upper management should be terminated.
Voice of: Father Of Student
"There's some takeaways from the meeting as well, and some things that need to be followed up on. Again, overall, it was a great meeting, a big success on that front, I have no complaints of qualms against the ministry, they articulated very well and explained every step of the way and process to me. One of the main things that we did was, we did ask them outright, did they receive any reports from the school about the prior incident that referred to in the messages the teacher sent to my daughter, involving another student and a teacher of a physical and sexual nature."
"And to their recollection, they don't recall seeing any reports. And that's not to say they didn't get any, they weren't in front of their computers, this was a face to face meeting, a sit down that happened."
"And so if there's no record of this, if there's no record at all, what this means is that this is typically how that particular principal and that particular vice principal deals with situations like this. And that should be alarming, there should be public outrage, there should be a call for the resignation of the principal, if it's true, if they didn't report it, there should be public outrage and call for the resignation, dismissal, termination, however you want to call it, of the principal and of the vice principal."
"Based on everything that was discussed and shared with me in terms of the process and due procedure which from the comments on the media it seems a lot of people are up in arms about, they have to understand that due process was not followed in a timely manner. That's the big issue here. It didn't get activated until I went to the media houses, spoke to the school, again, I want to go over the timeline real quick, we spoke to the school, informed them of the incident, provided proof, a week later nothing happened, a week later, one week. I sent an email, the email went unanswered, I showed up to the school the following day after that so that's a week and a day, thereabouts. Asked them again, take action, they refused to. I then instructed them of what I would be doing as my next steps, and it's only until I sent that email to all the media houses, the ministry and various groups, that they then reacted. I want to make that abundantly clear."
He also explained that the school hasn't completed the investigation as yet, so the ministry has not made a decision on the future of the teacher. But they have until February 25th to submit that report, at which time, the parents, the school's representatives, and the committee will meet. Once the decision is made, the parents have the right to appeal it and take it to a tribunal.
We will continue to follow this story.
