“The substitute teacher won’t be at school these days and that teacher won’t be back in class anymore.” It was the promise that the head teacher at the time had made to the families of class 5to of the elementary school of a school on the outskirts of Cesena, to whose students the substitute had shown an amateur video of her filming her in complete sexual acts with her boyfriend.
Now the Court of Cassation has given definitive execution to the dismissal for just cause that the teacher living in the Forlivese area, now over forty, had received a few dozen days after the explosion of the case, which was reported in the columns of Corriere Romagna at the end of September 2019.
The young substitute teacher had recently arrived in the class where those girls and boys (now all high school boys and girls) had to complete their elementary studies.
Leaving school, some of them told their parents what had happened: the teacher, they said, had in some cases firmly forced them to observe her sexual performances via smartphone, underlining how certain things were not done by “only their parents” and highlighting also (again according to the stories of the children at the time) how they shouldn’t have told them about those films at home. “At home they would have believed the teacher’s words and certainly not their own.”
However, things went differently than the accusations “planned” by the teacher. Word of the incident spread quickly and a petition was first filed (signed by 22 families) to ask the principal to remove the substitute from school. While series of complaints were filed with the Carabinieri by enraged parents, who told them what their children had described to them as having seen and been subjected to in class by the “red light substitute”.
In short, the teacher was dismissed “as a precaution” for just cause.
In just over 4 years (a record time when it comes to justice in Italy) the teacher saw her appeal against her dismissal rejected both by the labor judge of Forlì and by the Court of Appeal of Bologna. Now the Court of Cassation has put an end to the case, to which the teacher had appealed to cancel the dismissal but which instead confirmed that the forced removal from school was legitimate given what happened.
From a formal point of view, the teacher was fired for having “talked about sexuality and procreation in class after two pupils had argued heavily and ended up using strong words of a sexual or corporal nature”.
The teacher attempted to defend herself over time and also put forward various arguments in her appeal, claiming that she had not been adequately informed about the acts underlying the disciplinary dispute and questioning the validity of the evidence, which included statements from the children involved.
Furthermore, he denied using vulgar or crude language with the children, saying he had drawn and shown images only of an egg, a sperm and a zygote, and not of genital organs such as penises or vaginas. Nothing the teacher can do: despite the justifications, the Supreme Court confirmed the correctness of the previous sentences.
According to the judges, the evidence presented was sufficient to consider the teacher’s behavior completely “inappropriate”, even after taking into consideration the hypothesis that the students may have “exaggerated” what happened. The teacher, the judges write in the sentence, «tackled topics related to sexuality and procreation in class without any planning or coordination with other colleagues and in an unsuitable context. All of this – continues the sentence – with the effect of causing serious disturbance and discomfort in the students.” The teacher was also sentenced to pay 4 thousand euros in legal costs.
