Parents angry at how officials investigated Manatee kindergarten teacher for child abuse
Children in Sheri Fink’s kindergarten class at Braden River Elementary were showing textbook signs that they were being abused long before she was reported to the child abuse hotline in April 2018.
They cried and begged their parents not to make them go to class. They lost their self-confidence, at times calling themselves dumb or stupid. Sometimes they had complete melt-downs when they made a mistake.
“Well mommy, yeah, sometimes she hurts kids but she always says sorry after and she always says she loves us,” Irma Casella recalled her daughter telling her after Fink had been removed from her Braden River classroom.
The school’s principal, Hayley Rio, had told Casella she should expect to hear from the authorities.
Casella’s daughter would have told investigators looking into the teacher about Fink’s disturbing behavior toward her students. But they never asked.
Not the detectives from the Manatee County Sheriff’s Office. Nor the child abuse investigators who work there, too, under contract with the state.
Fink ultimately was suspended for two days, issued a letter of reprimand and transferred to another school in August 2018, following the conclusion of investigations by the sheriff’s office and the school district. In Manatee County, the sheriff’s office handles child welfare investigations for the Florida Department of Children and Families.
The child protection investigation concluded that Fink had abused students, verifying an allegation of physical injury. But a separate criminal investigation determined that the allegations of abuse were “unfounded.”
No criminal charges were filed in the case.
Investigations anger Braden River parents
The sheriff’s office’s finding seemed suspect to parents of Fink’s pupils, many of whom were angered when they read in the Bradenton Herald that a detective had written that “no witnesses had been located or come forward.”
“We had gone in and talked to (the) administration. We had concerns. We had issues,” parent Nina Edmunds said during an interview with the Herald. “Had anybody been notified, we would have all gladly made ourselves available about what had transpired. We all had strong feelings about what had (happened to) our children and how they were now acting. “
Deputies and child protection investigators with the sheriff’s office only spoke with three of the children in Fink’s classroom and their parents.
Jama Jean White, whose son was in Fink’s last kindergarten class, also disputes investigators’ claims that families snubbed them, saying she knows of many mothers who came forward.
“My son was one of the children called stupid, fat, idiot. My son was also one of the children to have the chair pulled out from under him,” White wrote in a message to the Bradenton Herald.
How the investigations were handled was very disheartening for Edmunds, who was a room mother in Fink’s class.
Edmunds had received numerous calls from the school on April 27, 2018, after a classroom volunteer called the state’s child abuse hotline. By the third call, she realized something must be terribly wrong, and she answered in a panic. Someone from the administration told her there had been an incident in Fink’s class and that there would be someone coming to her home that evening to speak to her and her husband. The administrator offered no other details.
Police and child abuse investigators never came to her home that evening, however, Edmunds said. They never came at all — though she was identified as a parent of one of the children Fink had knocked out of a chair.
Edmunds’ daughter was later interviewed by a school district investigator, although Edmunds was not allowed to be present, nor told specifically when it would take place, so she could at least be present at the school outside the room. She later questioned her daughter about what she told the investigator, and learned the youngster merely said: ” She’s not nice.”
“She still didn’t share anything specific. Not sure why. But much later, she shared with my mother-in-law that she had knocked her down,” Edmunds said.
Casella still remembers the day she got a text message from her husband saying, “Fink is gone.”
But the school did not give them any details, either. It would be later, on the last day of school in 2018, when a group of parents gathered outside school that she finally learned about the abuse.
After she was disciplined, Fink was transferred to Ballard Elementary School, where she taught first grade for a year before being allowed to retire this past summer with her pension intact. Later, Fink surrendered her teaching certificate after the state began proceedings to revoke it.
‘I never ever in a million years suspected she was physical with the kids’
Both Casella and Edmunds spent a lot of time volunteering inside Fink’s classroom, but they say Fink was not abusive in front of them.
“I never ever in a million years suspected she was physical with the kids. I just thought maybe she was rough with kids, verbally,” Casella said.
But, Edmunds said: “Any wise person isn’t going to be rude to a child in front of an outsider.”
Looking back, both women said they learned early on from interactions with other parents outside the school that they had also noticed a difference in their children.
“All their kids were fighting them (not) to go to class,” Edmunds said.
School district ‘covered this up’
Parents now live not only with the effects of Fink’s abuse on their children, but with regret that they blindly trusted a broken system and went against their parental instincts that told them something was happening, even if they didn’t know what.
Principal Rio, other staffers and administrators at the school district knew there was a problem with Fink, according to parents.
Casella remembers calling the principal after finally learning from other parents the specifics and extent of Fink’s abuse.
“During my conversation with Mrs. Rio, her response to me was: ‘I heard the rumors, I just didn’t realize it was that bad’ or ‘We can’t do anything, she’s protected by the teachers union.’”
Rio also told her that she didn’t think the abuse was physical, Casella recalled.
With rage she remembers saying to Rio: “So you knew there was something going on with this teacher and you put her with a classroom with 5-year-olds, little innocent kids that couldn’t stand up for themselves or protect themselves.”
“She didn’t say anything,” Casella said.
White told the Bradenton Herald she is “disgusted by the fact the school and school board covered this up and did nothing for years.”
“As far as Principal Rio goes I always thought she had the children’s best interest at heart when in a reality she did not want the bad publicity because she wanted the new school she was bidding for.”
Principal responds to parents’ complaints
Rio said she was not aware of any physical abuse prior to the child abuse hotline being called.
“While I had previously received reports from parents and staff members of concerns involving Ms. Fink’s attitude and demeanor --which I addressed with Ms. Fink on multiple occasions, both in person and by email -- the very first time I was told of physical abuse was when classroom volunteer Delynn Dorman brought it to my attention on April 25, 2018,” Rio said in a statement provided to the Bradenton Herald.
That allegation was called into the child abuse hotline but it was not accepted. Dorman came again to her two days later, Rio said, and it was that call to the hotline that sparked all the investigations into Fink.
After CPS accepted the second report, Rio said she immediately removed Fink from her classroom so that she would not have any contact with students.
“I want to clearly and emphatically state that I had no knowledge of any physical abuse involving Ms. Fink prior to Ms. Dorman reporting it to me on April 25, 2018. If Ms. Dorman witnessed physical abuse involving Ms. Fink prior to that date, she failed to report it to me, or any one else at our school that I am aware of, or to CPS,” Rio said.
Rio did not address any emotional or psychological abuse students might have suffered in Fink’s classroom.
Parents see changes in their kids
Although investigators said they did not find any injuries that Fink had caused to students in her class, the children’s parents have seen the effects of her abuse.
“Her confidence is totally shot. She doesn’t think she can do anything. She has meltdowns,” Casella said of her daughter. “She thinks she is dumb. She doesn’t think she could do something. If we are reading and she gets a word wrong, she starts smacking her forehead.“
Before starting Fink’s class, Casella’s daughter was “always very, very sociable and never afraid of anything.” By the end of kindergarten, however, her daughter didn’t even want to play with other children at birthday parties.
In hindsight, Casella said she beats herself up for getting forceful with her daughter in an effort to encourage her to play with other children.
“I remember my husband saying, ‘Let her be, if she doesn’t want to play, she doesn’t want to play,’ and I said, ‘Something’s wrong.’” Casella recalled.
In the time since being in Fink’s class, Casella and her husband enrolled their daughter in multiple after-school programs so that she would have plenty of extra-curricular activities.
“This year we went to a kid’s birthday party and she ran off to play with the other kids,” Casella said. “So I am finally seeing her turn around.”
As the school year wore on, Fink grew increasingly harsh and negative in her communication with parents. Edmunds recalls being confused by Fink ostensibly blaming her for her daughter’s troubles at school. Edmunds said Fink questioned whether she was working with her daughter at home, claiming the girl was making no progress.
“She has two sets of doting grandparents that pick her up every day and work with her extensively with homework and play. They play games. She’s got involvement. Parent involvement. Grandparent involvement,” Edmunds said. “There was paperwork that would come home with notes from her that sounded like so harsh for kindergarten. Why would you say something so tough like that for someone who is in the first year in school.”
White remembers having tears in her eyes as she asked Fink “if she had anything nice or good to say” about her son.
“She has scarred the kids,” White wrote. Her son “is going to be receiving occupational therapy because he is behind in some fundamental areas mostly... due to his experience in kindergarten.”
Edmunds was also forced to enroll her daughter in a reading program to get her back to the reading level she should be at. But she recognizes that other families can’t afford to spend hundreds of dollars on programs like that.
Although Edmunds’ daughter has still never disclosed to anyone, other than her grandmother, that Fink knocked her out of her chair, Edmunds said she observed tell-tale signs of possible abuse: changes in the youngster’s behavior, lack of confidence, and a decline in academic performance.
“She got to the point where she would do her homework and she would cower and try to hide what she was doing. I was like, ‘Lucy, I got to see what you’re doing so I can help you,’” Edmunds said.
Even after Fink was removed from the school, her daughter still lived in fear and would ask her, “Mom, Ms. Fink is not teaching anymore, right? She’s not going to come back to our classroom, right? She’s not coming back to our school?”
Edmunds would reassure her. At one point, she showed the girl Fink’s former classroom, which had been cleared out and turned into a computer lab.
“See,” the mother said, “she’s never coming back. She won’t be teaching at your school. You don’t have to see here again.”
“Oh, good, good,” the girl replied.
“Now that I look back at it, all the signs point to what was transpiring unbeknownst to me at the time,” Edmunds said.
This story was originally published December 13, 2019 at 5:00 AM.
