A group of middle school boys are being lauded as heroes after it was revealed they had been documenting a teacher who was acting inappropriately with students.
Eight students from Davisville Middle School in North Kingstown, Rhode Island, tried to report what was happening with a teacher. This included ogling girls in their class, giving them nicknames, and asking them to dance for him.
When the students tried to report the situation, they weren’t taken seriously.
This is what led to what they called the “pedo database”.
The Boston Globe interviewed one of the boys, who is now a 15-year-old high school student. According to him, this had been going on for decades, with no action taken against the teacher.
The teacher’s actions with female students made things uncomfortable for everyone.
“Sometimes they'd laugh. Sometimes they just kind of just sit there awkwardly. Even the ones that said he was 'creepy' laughed because they were obviously not trying to tick him off or anything. So they're just fake laughing, awkwardly laughing.”
Seeing their classmates in an uncomfortable position with an authority figure didn’t sit right with the boys. In January 2021, they started to track the teacher's behavior.
According to their database, the teacher asked female students to do things like “stand up and dance” and asked one girl to take off her shoes and wiggle her toes without moving her pinkie toes. One time, he even suggested all the students show up in bathing suits to their virtual class the next day.
When the school year came to an end, the students recruited a group of incoming students and asked them to keep tabs on the teacher, as they went on to the next school year.
Finally, it all came to a head when a student’s family accused the teacher of stalking her and threatened to sue the school. The boys had their chance to come forward with everything they documented.
Considering everything that went on, it’s amazing it took this long.
The pedo database is now in the hands of the U.S. Attorney’s Office and the state Department of Education as criminal and internal investigations into the teacher take place.
The teacher at the center of the investigation remains on leave, but some students are saying it’d be best if he didn’t come back.
The 15-year-old said to the Globe:
“Everybody has talked about it, since sixth grade, how much they’ve hated his behavior and all of that. That’s also why I feel like even if their investigation finds nothing, putting him back in the school would be a disaster.”
And hopefully, if something like this happens again, someone will believe the children.
