A Stevenson High School science teacher is under investigation for allegedly promoting bullying in the classroom after cellphone videos captured students lining up to throw balls at their classmates.
A parent filed a formal complaint against Kemberly Patteson, 41, on Thursday with the Stevenson-Carson School District, spurring Superintendent Dan Read to commission a third-party investigation into the matter. Patteson, who lives in Goldendale, has been placed on administrative leave.
That parent, Wendy Zapfe, told The Skamania County Pioneer newspaper that Patteson uses a Wheel of Fortune-style disciplinary method, where students spin to see what their punishment will be. The choices include: lunch detention, failing their next test, passing the punishment along to another student, buying Patteson a bottle of water or letting classmates pelt the students with balls, she said in an interview with Philip Watness, the editor of the paper.
“And then when all the kids were done throwing it, the teacher then threw it,” Zapfe said.
Two cellphone videos taken by students appear to show their classmates shielding their faces behind textbooks as other students throw balls at them. In one video, as students line up to take turns throwing at Zapfe’s daughter, Zoey Zapfe, one student can be heard asking, “How is this legal?”
When Zapfe asked her daughter about Patteson’s disciplinary methods, she learned that the wheel is nothing new in the class. A number of parents had already complained to the district about Patteson, she later learned.
Zapfe also told Watness that Patteson whizzes the balls by her students’ heads when she catches them chatting at inappropriate times. Several students have also been hit in the face with the balls, Zapfe said, adding that Patteson has a policy that if she hits a student in the face, the student gets to throw the ball back at her.
Any form of harassment, intimidation or bullying is a violation of the district’s anti-bullying policy. Zapfe said the district is failing to abide by its own rules.
“If the school is going to hold our children to a certain standard, then I would expect that our teachers are to be held to that same standard,” she said.
Superintendent Read announced the investigation in a statement released to the press Friday afternoon.
“The Stevenson-Carson School District strives to provide students with optimal conditions for learning by maintaining a school environment where everyone is treated with respect and no one is physically or emotionally harmed,” Read’s statement said. “Therefore, we take any type of reported bullying very seriously and begin investigating the situation immediately.”
Patteson didn’t respond to The Columbian’s requests for comment. She began working at the high school two years ago and previously taught chemistry at Central Washington and Louisiana State universities.
According to Patteson’s blog from CWU, she also spent some time as a semi-professional baseball player before coming to Stevenson.
