Lockers in a school hallway/Shutterstock
A former vice-principal at a school in Comox has been disciplined for an incident in which she checked to see if students were wearing underwear after feces and a pair of underwear were found in a school bathroom.
The teacher has since been fired.
Delphine Yvette Andree Guerineau was working at École Au-couer-de-I’lle when the incident happened on June 19, 2018. It began with her finding the underwear on the lid of a toilet in a boys’ washroom, along with feces on the floor.
Guerineau then made boys from grades 3 to 11 show her the waistbands of their underwear in order to identify who was responsible. She visited the classrooms of students in grades 3 to 6, while those in grades 7 to 11 were lined up in the hallway for the underwear check.
Two days later, she was put on paid leave pending an investigation by School District 93, B.C.’s francophone school district. Her employment was terminated effective Sept. 17, 2018.
In a consent resolution agreement posted publicly online on Tuesday, the B.C. Commissioner for Teacher Regulation said Guerineau agreed that what she did constituted professional misconduct, and consented to a reprimand.
The report said that Guerineau failed to give proper consideration to the consequences of her actions, her actions had the potential to cause emotional harm to students and she failed to show appropriate behaviour for an administrator.
Guerineau acknowledged her reaction to the situation was inappropriate.
