Florida is a wild place man! Normally my stories that are featured from there are instances where meth and mental problems are the root cause of the amusing news but there is nothing amusing about this story and it says a lot about the public education system and why we have a ton of people deciding to homeschool their kids these days.
A woman who has been an educator for nearly 40 years and teaches special needs kids was trying to give story-time to a group of 3 and 4 year old's when a child with autism started doing what kids with autism do and I guess she had gone through this one too many times because she decided to put him into a choke hold of sorts in an effort to calm him so she could carry on with the story with the other children.
src
She did this despite the fact that she knew there was an adult observer in the classroom with her who had a phone with a camera on it and carried on with the story-time as though there was nothing out of the ordinary about using MMA on a 3-year old. So to me, this begs the question "what sort of abusive crap was she doing when there WASN'T and observer there?"
Normally I wouldn't name and shame the people that are featured in these things but Vilma Otero's name needs to be known. I don't have any children so I don't know how much rage I would feel if this was my child but I can imagine it is a lot. The people of the world entrust teachers with their children every day and this is completely unacceptable. What's worse, when she was arrested for this later on she maintained that she had done nothing wrong stating that "I have received a wide variety of techniques for dealing with problematic children in the classroom." So this was one of them? I have a hard time believing that this sort of thing would be approved by any university that issues teaching certificates!
src
Vilma has been arrested and is charged with felony child abuse without great bodily harm. I suppose this is a fair enough charge because it is the only incident that we have any proof of but still, how long has this been going on if she has been a teacher for 36 years? In Florida, it is unlikely that she will do any time for this but I hope that they do some sort of background research into her past classes to see if this is simply normal behavior for her and she has been a serial abuser of children for entire career.
I don't envy teachers at all. I can't think of a job that I would rather not do. I know that it is probably extremely difficult and also comes with relatively poor pay. However, teachers know this is part of the deal when they decide to take on this profession when they are in higher education so they shouldn't be so surprised when they get there and it ends up being exactly as advertised.
I believe that the public education system in USA is very bad but it is alarming to me to see that it has come to a physical abuse situation like this one and I am sure Vilma is not the only person doing it. We have seen photos and videos come forward of people abusing babies and the elderly a lot more lately because of technology that exists these days and it makes me wonder how widespread something like this is and perhaps always has been. Things even remotely like this never happened to me as a child though, nor did I ever so much as witness anything even a bit like it.
So what do you think should happen to Vilma? I think she obviously should be stripped of her teaching license and have the felony on her permanent record. I don't think however, that jail time is warranted here as it wouldn't benefit her or the child. This is of course pending the investigation into her past to see if there were other instances that simply weren't reported. That sounds like a convoluted solution of course but honestly, putting her in jail would just be a burden for the state when the other things will probably be enough to prevent her from causing any additional harm. It is still a very shocking thing to think that she would be so brazen to do this right in front of an observer that she knew was there.
