'Creep' Rhode Island teacher put on leave after schoolboys track his interactions via 'pedo database'
NORTH KINGSTOWN, RHODE ISLAND: A group of eight Davisville Middle School boys in North Kingstown started to document one of their teacher's actions as they considered him a "creep" and kept records of interactions between him and girls in their class. The teacher is now under investigation and is on administrative leave. The students formed their "pedo database" after they witnessed their teacher gazing at the girls in their class and giving them nicknames such as "sweetheart" and "sunshine". He even asked them to dance for him.
In an interview with The Boston Globe, one of the boys, now a 15-year-old high-school student, told the publication that the group had tried reporting the situation but that the students had not been taken seriously. The teacher even reportedly commented that complaints had been made against him for decades but that no action had ever been taken, stated the newspaper. The teenager said that the teacher’s alleged actions had made the girls feel uncomfortable in his class.
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"Sometimes they'd laugh. Sometimes they just kind of just sit there awkwardly," the student said. "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." The class began making notes of the unnamed teacher’s behavior in January 2021 using Discord, a social media platform. "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 boy wrote in the group chat, according to the Globe. Although the teacher's name was not disclosed, local teachers and students "know who he is."
The student said that the Discord channel was updated in real-time when the school was held virtually due to covid pandemic. According to the channel, in one instance, the teacher remarked everyone should be "in bathing suits tomorrow." The boy told the newspaper that he had felt bad for the girls in the class as “sometimes it just seems like it was a humiliating thing.” And he added, “He’d play a song and he’d make one of them get up and dance.”
According to The Globe, the teacher was escorted from the school in April, with officials saying that he was under investigation for allegations that he had stalked a preteen middle-school girl and been inappropriate toward others. When members of the public were asked to come forward with information, one of the boys in the class told his mother about the Discord channel and they contacted a lawyer for the girl’s family. The Globe report states that the log has been shared with the US attorney’s office, the Rhode Island Department of Children, Youth, and Families, the state education department, and a lawyer leading an investigation for the school.
"I did not ever think this would actually be used as evidence, but we always had it as if it was," the teen told the outlet. "So I'm glad that we did, even though it might have seemed like slightly stupid at times."