A daycare teacher is facing decades in prison after she was found guilty of 13 felony and misdemeanour charges including assault and child cruelty.
According to the Telegraph, the court heard that Sarah Jordan from Virginia encouraged toddlers at Minnieland Academy in Woodbridge to fight each other – she also physically and emotionally abused them for her own entertainment.
The former teacher told one young girl that she was ‘ugly’ and ‘looked like a rat’ and, according to a social services report, targeted children who were scared of water by spraying them in the face with a high pressure hose and dumping buckets of water on them.
Jordan denied the charges, claiming she had used a hose to sprinkle children with water on occasion, but never tried to hurt them.
One father testified that his daughter had ‘completely stopped talking’ once she was in Jordan’s class, while another said his son had been forced to fight other children.
He told reporters:
The teacher was making him the class bully made to fight. She knows what she did. Justice has prevailed.
Three of Jordan’s co-workers also testified against her, saying they had witnessed her abusing the toddlers, while Prosecutor Ashleigh Landers told the court that Jordan had created “a baby fight club,” doing huge damage to the children’s psyches.
Other parents revealed that their children had become scared of water, and some had started copying the abuse described in the classroom.
James J. McCoart, a lawyer representing a number of the families said:
[Jordan’s] actions were not only cruel and traumatic, but outrageous criminal conduct on our community’s most vulnerable.
26-year-old Kierra Spriggs – another former member of staff from the centre – is scheduled for trial under similar charges next month.
