LRSD hearing held on termination complaint over toilet cleaning incident

The Little Rock School Board held a staff hearing Thursday on whether to overturn the termination of a former kindergarten teacher. Board members voted not to overrule Kelly Simon's termination, meaning she will not return to her post.

Simon came under fire after she told an unnamed student at Don Roberts Elementary to clog a toilet with his bare hands.

Thursday's hearing was packed with other teachers who came to support Simon. Many of the teachers who testified on her behalf at the hearing wrote letters supporting her and burst into applause for Simon at one point in the proceedings.

David Kizzia, the LRSD's staff attorney, said, “The facts are undisputed.”

“We are here for the rights of a child,” he said in his opening speech. “I will ask the board to follow its own rules.”

Simon defends himself through her lawyer by saying that the student misbehaved when he was asked to clean the toilet. She said she tries to “help the student see the natural consequences of their actions to hopefully change their behavior.”

Simon has been teaching for 12 years with regular positive performance reviews and has been named Teacher of the Year in the past.

The incident occurred on the morning of August 22nd in the toilet attached to Simon's classroom. Simon said at this point the toilet had clogged three times within a few days of the start of the school year.

“Most five-year-olds are not well trained in bladder control,” she said in her statement. “So if there is no bathroom available, it causes a lot of inconvenience.”

“I feel their pain,” Kizzia replied.

She said three boys went into the bathroom before it was blocked. She asked the boys who had clogged the toilet before sending them to their desks for “thinking time.” This took “a few minutes.”

She sent a text message to her administrators requesting a “come to the Jesus meeting.” Even though they didn't come in time. When she then turned to the students again, the first two boys denied this.

“I don’t know how many five-year-olds you were with,” she said in her statement. “But five-year-olds aren’t particularly good liars. It was really clear that the first two weren't responsible. I’ve been teaching for a while now.”

After thinking about what to do, she said she told the third boy he needed to “clean the toilet or go to the principal's office.” She said she was “confident” she was accusing the right student.

“I didn’t believe it was a punitive or unreasonable consequence, but rather a natural consequence,” she said.

Throughout the hearing, Simon insisted that a visual inspection revealed he had unclogged a “sparklingly clean toilet with no signs of urine or faeces”. She said she wouldn't have told the student to clean the toilet if it had been “unclean.” Simon says she then made sure the student washed his hands.

School board member Joyce Wesley asked why he had to wash his hands when the toilet was clean. Simon said students should wash their hands if they “use the toilet in any way.”

“There was feces,” Wesley replied. “Couldn’t it be true that it really couldn’t have been clean?”

Simon then had email correspondence with the student's parents. The student's mother said she appreciated the teachers' consistency and patience and would “welcome feedback.” The email suggested that the student was falsely accused, but even if he was correctly accused, being asked to clean the toilet was “not an acceptable consequence.”

Simon said in her statement that the student would have protested if he had been wrongly accused.

“If a five-year-old thinks something isn’t fair, he’ll definitely tell you.”

The mother said the child did not object because she “always emphasized the importance of listening to her teachers and following instructions.”

Simon said she doesn't have a problem with the parents and she wants to “restore their trust.” She also believed that for the student, the incident was “not an event in his world.”

“It seems as if [he] “If someone had been humiliated, that would have been an immediate reaction that I would have seen,” she said.

Simon became emotional during the hearing and stated that she would not handle the situation the same way again. But she also said that the parents' reaction was a “generational thing”.

Kizzia asked in the LRSD manual if the toilet blockage was a result. Simon admitted that this was not the case.

Don Roberts Elementary School Principal Steven Helmick supported the decision to fire the teacher.

“It is simply not acceptable for a student to put their bare hands into a toilet to unclog it for any reason,” he said.

Helmick said when guards clean a toilet, they use equipment. He also said she could have called the front desk for help and not just sent a text message.

He says he told the student that “he didn't do anything to deserve putting his hands in the toilet.”

Leigh Ann Wilson was the only school board member to disagree with the termination.

A teacher at Crystal Hill Elementary in North Little Rock was terminated following a similarly high-profile incident in 2021.