Parent alleges abuse, says special needs students were squirted with water to control behavior

A Johnston County mother says her daughter was assaulted and abused by teachers' assistants at Corinth Holders High School. They tried to correct her behavior with a water spray bottle, and the 15-year-old girl came home with wet clothes.

Jamie Skinner was one of several students in her small special needs classroom whom her mother said was sprayed with water over the course of several months as a behavior modification.

Kristin Skinner calls it inhumane.

"Our daughter Jamie was being treated like an animal," Kristin Skinner wrote in a complaint to the school board and the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction.

Once she was able to understand what was happening, Skinner sought answers from the school.

"I reached out to her teachers, not knowing all three were suspended," she said.

She learned that the teachers' assistants were forced to resign or were terminated on Dec. 8, but she was not notified until this week, when one of the dismissed staffers emailed parents. In that message, they admitted to using a spray bottle on a student who "would hit his head so hard and so long that he would cause himself to bleed" and on another who was "lying in inappropriate locations that could be dangerous."

Special needs students, she said, are "a vulnerable population uniquely unable to defend" themselves.

Fedders believed improper training for the teachers' assistants could be at play.

"People are put in tough circumstances and asked to manage things they are not trained to do," she said.

"I'd like justice done to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else," she wrote to the school board.

In a statement, the Johnston County School System said:

Although we cannot discuss the specifics of an investigation into alleged staff misconduct, we can confirm that whenever such allegations arise, our administration responds swiftly, by investigating the allegations and, sometimes, by removing staff from classrooms pending completion of a thorough review.