A former substitute teacher in Mesquite, Tex. is under arrest after allegedly encouraging students to fight during class.
Dallas teacher Natally Garcia, 24, was charged Monday with four counts of endangering a child after turning herself in to police.
She had already been fired last week after video footage came out showing students in hand-to-hand combat. The incident occurred last Wednesday at Kimbrough Middle School in the suburb 13 miles east of Dallas.
“Investigators determined that Garcia engaged in conduct that placed four students in danger of bodily injury,” the Mesquite Police Department said in a statement after reviewing the cell phone footage taken surreptitiously by a student.
The footage showed Garcia clearing space for the students, aged 12 and 13, to fight, reported KXAS-TV. Garcia also outlined fight rules and assigned one student to keep watch at the door so they wouldn’t be discovered, district officials said..
“What I need you to do is stand by that door and hold it in case somebody comes in,” Garcia said in the video, according to KDFW-TV.
She was “definitely trying to conceal her actions and actions that were going on in the class,” Mesquite Police Department Lieutenant Brandon Ricketts told KDFW.
After firing Garcia, who had worked there since March 6, the Mesquite Independent School District notified parents of the students who had been in the class.
“As of yesterday, she is no longer employed by the district and is not eligible for rehire in any capacity,” the district said in a statement obtained by KXAS, calling her actions “appalling and intolerable.”
Parents were shocked, noting that the effects rippled beyond the actual fighting.
“I saw the video. I paused it multiple times because I was in utter disbelief,” said Betty Martinez, mother of the girl who recorded the incident. “I thought it was a joke. I didn’t think it was real. My brain couldn’t comprehend what was going on. What the teacher did, the substitute did, was bad — but that influenced and encouraged other kids to be disrespectful, to be ugly.”
It’s not the first time teachers have staged fights among their students. In 2012, three Delaware daycare workers were arrested after it came out that they had pitted toddler against toddler in a fistfight. The daycare center’s license was suspended.
In 2016, two New Jersey women who were caught on Snapchat encouraging 4-year-olds to beat each other up in daycare, pleaded guilty to charges of fourth-degree child abuse.
Likewise, a video of a “toddler fight club” orchestrated by two workers at a St. Louis daycare went viral in 2018 after the staffers were charged with first-degree endangering the welfare of a child, creating a substantial risk. In the 2016 incident, the staffers instigated 35 minutes of fighting between their 3- and 4-year-old charges to entertain them when the facility’s heater broke. But it left a boy crying and with a black eye on his fourth birthday.