A New Jersey mother is currently keeping her daughter far, far away from her public school. Why? Because according to 5-year-old Ke’Nya Febry her teacher made her retrieve a bagel she'd tossed into a trash can and eat it. "She’s being treated like a dog," her mother Kandice Taylor told the South Jersey Times. "Like an animal, and I am not going to let this happen to my daughter anymore."
"Because of the investigation, I don’t want her going back to school until things have been resolved," the girl's mother went on. "She is humiliated. She is so embarrassed. I am bringing her to a psychologist next week because of all this...She is tormented. She has nightmares every night.”
While Ke'Nya is being kept out of school, the school's attorney is "finding out what proper procedures the school should follow," according to school board President William Miller. The school is understandably trying to be cautious in the case: "We are absolutely concerned that Ke’Nya is not attending school," Miller told a reporter. "But I don’t have all the information and I can’t speculate on the situation until everything has been brought to light."
According to her mother, Ke'Nya came home last week upset over the incident and quickly told the whole story. When Taylor confronted the teacher in question, they didn't deny it. "The teacher admitted it to me right away in front of the superintendent," Taylor said. "The teacher told me that she wouldn’t have had a problem eating the bagel. She also refused to apologize. It wasn’t until I threatened to file a police report, hire an attorney and go to The News that the superintendent offered an apology. There was absolutely no sign of remorse from the teacher."
Making the whole story more complicated, Ke'Nya's family is, according to her mother, "a low-income black family. Most of the people who attend the school are white." Further, Ke'Nya's lunch is subsidized and provided free by the school.
