Melissa Carter of Central Elementary School in Clewiston, Florida, was caught paddling a 6-year-old girl in a viral video secretly filmed by the student’s mother.
The footage shows she hit the whimpering child at least three times on the rear with a wooden paddle after a school clerk identified as Cecilia Self held the girl against a table.
The poor little girl was being punished for reportedly causing $50 in damage to a computer.
Corporal punishment is legal in Florida, but prohibited in the Hendry County School District, where Central Elementary is located.
“Nobody would have believed me,” said the girl’s mother when asked why she filmed the video.
“The hatred with which she hit my daughter, I mean it was a hatred that, really I’ve never hit my daughter like she hit her,” the girl’s mom said in Spanish. “I had never hit her.”
The state attorney’s office is considering criminal charges against Clark and the clerk, a lawyer for the family said.
“The child is terrified, she feels vulnerable,” attorney Brent Probinsky said. “There’s nothing she can do in the hands of these adults, who treated her so brutally, savagely, sadistically.”
