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The Rhode Island teacher, who works at Davisville Middle School in North Kingstown, has been placed on administrative leave amid a probe into numerous claims of inappropriate behavior, including that he made female students dance for him, the outlet reports.
One of the former students, now a 15-year-old high school student, told The Boston Globe that he and several other male classmates decided to document the man’s “creepy” behavior in January 2021, during their seventh grade year, after first noticing it the year prior.
That’s when, on multiple occasions, they witnessed him leering at female students, giving them pet nicknames, and treating boys with cruelty, they told the outlet.
“Sometimes they’d laugh. Sometimes they just kind of just sit there awkwardly,” the boy told the Globe.
“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.”
He said students reported the behavior to adults, but nobody took them seriously. They said it made the boys feel uncomfortable seeing their female classmates struggle to deal with the “flirting.”
The teacher, who was also a coach and involved in extracurricular activities, allegedly told the students that he’d dealt with parents’ complaints for nearly 30 years and there was nothing anyone could do to him, according to the report.
Fed up with his behavior, the eight students created a subchannel on Discord, named the “Pedo Database,” and asked other students to post his “pedo moments” and quotes in an effort to “get evidence,” one boy wrote.
“This is now the official chat that we will later use as evidence against [the teacher] about pedophilia in case anything does come up in the future and we do turn out to be right,” one student wrote.
“Whenever he says something creepy towards the girls in our class, post it in quotes with the date here,” he continued.
When classes moved online during the COVID-19 pandemic, students documented the behavior in real time.
Male classmates later reported instances of flirting with and teasing female students. Other times he called them “sweetheart” and “sunshine,” the boys claimed.
On another occasion, the teacher asked one girl to take off her shoes and try to wiggle her toes without moving her pinkies, students claimed.
“I felt bad for [the girls] because sometimes it just seems like it was a humiliating thing,” the boy told the Boston Globe.
“He’d play a song and he’d make one of them get up and dance.”
In April 2022, the North Kingstown School District announced that a teacher had been placed on leave amid an investigation into claims that a teacher had stalked a pre-teen girl at the middle school while he was her coach.
The district did not name the teacher, but confirmed it is also investigating claims that he was inappropriate with other girls.
Among them are allegations that the teacher held coaching sessions in his basement and seemed “fixated” on a select few girls, the Globe reports.
The mother of one of the boys who created the log has since given it to the US Attorney’s Office, the state Department of Children, Youth, and Families, and the state Department of Education.
A copy is also in the hands of the lawyer who is conducting an internal investigation for the school district.
Click here for the full story from The Boston Globe.
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