A teacher in Beaumont, Texas has been arrested for a video that surfaced of her repeatedly hitting a male student, according to the New York Daily News.
@pside_prince this. pic.twitter.com/ItIkgq9Pw1
— khay (@khay2you) April 8, 2016
Mary Hastings of Ozen High School was arrested on Friday morning after the video went viral on Twitter. The clip, which apprears to have originally been posted on Snapchat captioned with a laughing emoji, shows an angry Hastings throwing the student’s papers off of his desk before hitting him five times and calling him an idiot. After the assault, the teacher begins to mock the student while the entire classroom erupts in laughter.
“You’re stopping them from graduating, you idiot ass,” Hastings yells in the video.
None of the footage shows what happened leading up to the exchange but student witness Atyra Deroune told 12News that the boy asked about his grade.
“He asked Ms. Hastings for the grade or whatever and she went awol and she picked up the papers and threw it at him,” Deroune, a sophomore, said.
Deroune also claimed that the incident was out of character for Hastings, and that she is normally a “cool teacher.”
In a press release, Beaumont school officials stated that Hastings was “immediately removed” from the classroom following the incident and has been placed on administrative leave.