No Assault Charge For Lawson Teacher Accused In Spitting Incident

FLORISSANT, MO — Prosecutors have declined to charge a second-grade teacher at Lawson Elementary School with assault after an 11-year old student accused him of spitting on her in November. Ed Magee, a spokesman for the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney's office, said there was insufficient evidence to charge anyone with a crime in the case. "[The teacher] didn't spit on someone. He spit sunflower seeds into the air, and one fell on the young girl," he said, citing an investigation by the Florissant Police Department.

But for the girl's mother, Erica Sanders, that isn't good enough. "What do I tell my daughter?" she said.

Hazelwood School District, of which Lawson is a part, placed the teacher on administrative leave last year and promised to investigate. To date, the school has issued no update on their investigation's progress.

What's more, another mother has told Patch that the same teacher spit on her 10-year-old son, too, last spring and the district has yet to follow through on any disciplinary action related to that incident. She spoke on condition of anonymity because her son is still enrolled at Lawson Elementary and she didn't want her account to have an adverse impact on her interactions with the school district. Nonetheless, she felt compelled to come forward when she heard Sanders' story.

"I do not want the world to think that this was one incident or, even worse, that Ms. Sanders' daughter is not telling the truth," she explained.

Both parents described a history of bullying and discrimination by the teacher, who they say treated black children differently from white children in his classes. Both separately had their children removed from his classes and neither knew each other before the spitting incident became public last year.

Sanders is now homeschooling her daughter, Kalee, and said the school harassed her and her daughter for speaking up. Sanders believes only the attention of the media and the Florissant Police Department finally forced the district to place the teacher on administrative leave.

Sanders described what happened to her daughter.

"Kalee and a group of children were on the playground during their gym period," she said. "The teacher came up to the crowd of kids and he was eating a bag full of sunflower seeds. He took a handful and put them in his mouth and started chewing them. Kalee said one of the kids said, 'Give me some, let me have some,' and he told them no and said, 'I'm not going to share these seeds, but I can give you guys a waterfall.'"

That's when he spit the seeds at Kalee, Sanders said. The seeds landed on her daughter's face and got into her mouth, then Kalee went to the other side of the playground and started to cry.

"I'm sure he saw the seeds on Kalee's face because she said he started laughing real hard," Sanders said. "When Kalee got home she was agitated and she wasn't herself."

After coming forward about the incident, Kalee said teachers started ignoring her in class. And Sanders said the school district started asking questions about her residency, trying to get her daughter removed from the school. She confronted school administrators and tried to sit in on her daughter's classes to observe — something she'd done in the past — until two Hazelwood School District security officers hand-delivered a letter banning her from school property.

"On many occasions we have attempted to work with you and for you on issues affecting you and your children," the letter obtained by Patch read. "Unfortunately, we can no longer tolerate the discourteous behavior which has impacted the integrity of the school affect [sic] the school climate. Therefore, you will no longer be permitted ono [sic] the school grounds at Lawson School Elementary [sic]."

Sanders said she received the letter after being told she could no longer observe what was going on in the classroom without an appointment.

"So I made the appointment, and I was due to come the next morning," she said. "Later on that same evening, Dr. Warner called me and told me I wasn't allowed back at Lawson period."

Christa Warner is the district assistant superintendent for elementary education.

Both mothers said their problems with the teacher began with minor slights and vague, non-specific disciplinary issues. "He would call me and say, 'Kalee is being disrespectful,'" Sanders said. "I'd ask him, 'What is she doing?' I'd leave work and come to the school, and when I got there he couldn't give me an explanation of what she was doing."

The 10-year-old's mother gave an almost identical account. The teacher often accused her son of being disrespectful, but when confronted, she said, he couldn't remember why or gave vague answers: "He was making noises with his mouth," was one example. In another instance, she said, the teacher misspelled her son's name when he wrote it on the board. Her son tried to correct him.

"The teacher told him, 'I can write what I want,' " the child's mother said. "He deliberately disregarded anything my son had to say and left it up there. I have raised my son that his name is his name — you don't allow anybody to devalue who you are."

She said she talked with the teacher after that incident and that he apologized and admitted he was wrong, but the issues continued. Before winter break last year, she took her son out of the teacher's class.

"It was just every day, all the time," she explained. "There was always something going on with that teacher, and I just said, 'I want him out of this class.' My son didn't have any issues with his other teachers."

But, that didn't fix the problem. Though her son was no longer in the teacher's homeroom class, he still had him for math. It was in math class that the teacher spit on the 10-year-old, the boy's mother said.

"On May 12, my son came home and told me that his teacher had spit Graham crackers on his shirt. My son asked if he could contact me, but the teacher said, 'No, if you tell your mom then I'm going to tell her what you said to another student.'"

The boy told his mother anyway, and she emailed the school's principal, Melissa Adkins, but found her incredulous and more concerned with keeping the teacher out of trouble than protecting her son. School officials cited "poor judgment" to explain the teacher's actions, she told Patch, and a conversation with Warner wasn't any more productive.

"I asked her what actions would be taken, and she told me they couldn't tell me. She told me it would be taken care of, but couldn't tell me how," the student's mother said. "If they had put him on administrative leave then, then we probably wouldn't be in this situation now. I just feel like the school system dropped the ball."

On Nov. 21, a full week after the second spitting incident was reported in the media, the school finally notified parents that something was going on.

Recently, several parents have contacted the District regarding student safety as a result of media publicity and a personnel matter at Lawson Elementary School. We want to ensure you that our school is safe. We have increased security at our school as we continue to work through this very difficult time.

The personnel matter is being addressed; however, due to confidentiality, we cannot go into details. What we can share is that a certified teacher is in place for our students

We also want to inform you that additional measures have been put into place to ensure no individual is allowed in our school to cause disruption to the learning environment. We realize that many of you may want specifics about the personnel matter, but we are handling this situation to a resolve. Our goal is to ensure that Lawson will return to the excellent school environment that it has always been

Thank you for your patience and continued support of our school.

The letter seems to refer to both the teacher and Sanders, whom the school had accused of disruptive behavior. Some time after the incident, Sanders, with a hand-made sign, had started protesting on a public sidewalk across from the school.

Both mothers said they believe the school treated their children differently because they were black. Black children are disciplined more often and more severely at the school than white children, they said, citing personal experience and things their children have told them.

Those claims are in line with a report released in October by the American Civil Liberties Union on discrimination in Missouri schools. The report found that black students, especially black girls, are disciplined and suspended far more often than their white peers; it blamed both implicit bias on the part of teachers and school administrators, as well as school policies that disparately affect minority students, such as those that punish vague infractions like "defiance."

Sanders mentioned another incident that she said upset not only Kalee but many girls at the school. Before she was banned from school property, Sanders helped organize a mock election at Lawson in 2016 in which most of the girls voted for Hillary Clinton. Kalee told her mother the same teacher who would later spit on her had come to school the day after the election and gloated that Donald Trump had won the presidency.

"They said that he went on and on about how happy he was that Donald Trump won," Sanders said. "Some of the girls got really upset."

She described the teacher intentionally taunting Kalee and her friends over political views the children didn't fully understand. The teacher in question is white, as are almost all the teachers at Lawson, while more than half of the school's students are black.

Officials with Hazelwood School District and Lawson Elementary School did not respond to repeated request for comment, nor did the accused teacher. This story will be updated if that changes.

Photo: Erica Sanders protests outside Lawson Elementary School. (J. Ryne Danielson/Patch)