Teacher fired for kicking girl, 5, after she hid in a bookcase

A teacher was fired after she was caught on camera kicking a five-year-old girl who hid in a bookcase.

Crystal Smith was fired from the Bluejacket-Flint Elementary School in Shawnee, Kansas last month school officials investigated the incident in the school’s library on February 21.

The unidentified girl’s family recently announced that they will be filing a lawsuit regarding the case and prosecutors said they may be pursuing criminal charges.

KCTV released the footage of the incident on Thursday after they spoke with the girl’s mother – who said the school did nothing when her daughter told administrators what happened.

The distraught mother said: ‘I was just angry that someone could do that.’

She said that she picked her child up from school on the day of the incident and her daughter told her: ‘I don’t like my teacher. She’s really mean. She hit me on the arm.’

The mother said she discovered a red mark on her daughter’s arm, so she confronted Smith and recorded their conversation.

In the recording, Smith can be heard blaming the child for causing the mark on her arm and says: ‘I’m not surprised she has some marks on her. She was crawling…And I’m not surprised because she shoved herself into that bookshelf…I mean, she kicked me a couple times.’

In the footage in the library, the child could not be seen kicking Smith, who continued to say: ‘The way she was lashing about and crawling into the bookshelf, I’m not surprised she doesn’t have a mark on her arm.’

The mother was aware of the cameras, and sensed something was not right with Smith’s explanation, so she requested to look at the footage herself – and was shocked to see what actually happened.

She said: ‘When I saw the video it was heartbreaking, because everything she said, she sat at the same table as me and just lied about everything … she lied to me. She lied to everyone else. She was almost really convincing.’

‘I said, “OK, had my child not said anything to me, you were just going to go behind closed doors and speak to everyone else, and if something came up then you’d let me know? But had she not said anything to me it all. I may not have ever known,'” she continued.

Following Smith’s termination on March 25, the school released this statement: ‘The Shawnee Mission School District was deeply distressed by the actions shown in the video. We take our responsibility to keep our children safe extremely seriously, and as parents and educators, we are heartbroken whenever a child is not treated with love and respect.

‘As soon as we discovered what happened, we acted to remove the teacher from contact with students, and proceeded immediately to terminate that teacher.’