After 24 years of teaching, Pam Aister was fired from her job at Four Peaks Elementary School in Arizona for defending one of her pupils from racial abuse.
Bullies had cornered nine-year-old Malachi Gillis shouting racist insults and throwing rocks at him. Pam saw the bullying and intervened.
"He is not alone. When you pick on him - you pick on me.” the teacher reportedly told the bullies. “It is not five to one anymore. It is five to two. There will be no more taunting, teasing and racial names called. That is not acceptable here; do you understand?”
A mother of one of the bullying children complained, and Pam was fired by the school board for being “too harsh”.
Malachi’s mother, Jennifer, is outraged at the treatment of the other teacher to stand up for her son.
"That makes me beyond mad because why is she being fired for something she is supposed to do?" she fumed.
"She's supposed to be standing up for the students," Jennifer said. "They didn't like it, so it turned into her threatening the kids because she stood up for this one black child in her class."
Malachi was picked on from the moment her started at the school, which got so bad he has since had to move schools. “’You belong to a zoo,' 'stupid head,' 'monkey,' 'crackhead,'” were among the usual insults he says the bullies would hurl at him.
Both the boy and his mum reported the bullies countless times to staff, but they were ignored.
“They would usually say, 'Oh well, I'm going to let him off with a warning,'" Malachi recalled. “Either that, or they would just ignore me.”
“The first teacher he had, it was nothing but depression, sad, self-esteem was low,” his mum explained. “He was being bullied, and nobody was doing anything.”
When Pam tried to protect him, Malachi says the other kids “were all around me and they started throwing rocks.”
The bullies accused Pam of using personal insults, calling one boy ugly and telling them to shut up. The teacher denied saying these things, but the school board didn’t believe her, and said there was no evidence that the racist bullying had occurred.
Malachi’s mum now plans to sue the school district. A petition on Change.org was set up in defence of Pam’s reinstatement as a teacher, which has received nearly 9,000 signatures.
