An ex-principal in California was slapped with misdemeanor child abuse charges on September 7, 2022 for shoving a special needs student to the ground—and it was caught on camera.
Ex-California Principal Charged After Released Video Shows Them SHOVING a Special Needs Child to the Floor
The Fresno Unified School District released the footage from June 2022 which showed former Wolters Elementary School principal Brian Vollhardt pushing an 11-year-old to the floor.
The incident happened while Vollhardt and the teachers were working with the student. In the video, the student points at the principal twice before being shoved to the ground.
According to an arrest affidavit obtained by CNN affiliate KFSN, Vollhardt said that the child “was yelling and getting in the principal/suspect’s face” in addition to making threats.
KFSN spoke with the child’s guardian—Ann Frank—who said that the case against Brian Vollhardt didn’t move forward until she raised a complaint about him not being charged in late August 2022. Frank said that it took the school district three months to show her the shocking video.
While the school district didn’t touch on the ex-principal’s statement, Superintendent Bob Nelson pointed out that Vollhardt did the opposite of what is expected of someone working in their school system:
“Instead of de-escalating the situation, which is what we expect of an educator in our system, the former principal chose to aggressively shove the student down instead.”
Frank said the same pointing out that a teacher or principal “cannot put force to these kids like that.” On the note of the Fresco PD following up on the case much later than expected, Chief Paco Balderama was at the September 8 press conference and kind of put this on the school district as far as him just finding out about the situation:
“I found out about the incident two days ago. At about 3 p.m. on Tuesday. We have since gone back and looked at our process on how these types of cases are handled. I as police chief want to be notified any time there’s an assault this serious occurs in any one of our schools. That didn’t happen in this case.”
After the incident, Brian Vollhardt was placed on administrative leave on June 8, 2022 when the school district heard about the incident.
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