A South Florida teacher has been arrested after police said she forced a 10-year-old to unclog a urinal with his bare hands.
Jennifer Forshey, 58, was charged with battery of a child by exposure to urine, according to a Coral Springs arrest report.
Forshey was booked into jail Wednesday and later released on $1,000 bond.
"I did not do anything illegal," Forshey said as she left the jail.
Police said Forshey, a teacher at Broward Community Charter School, accused the boy of clogging the urinal with paper towels. She then ordered him to use his hands and a paper towel to remove all the paper from the drain, the report said.
Officials noted the boy's hands were saturated in "what smelled like urine" from the urinal and that the bathroom had no soap in it.
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Forshey did not give the child safety equipment to clean the urinal, police said.
The boy told police the urine was not his and that he did not know who had clogged the urinal.
Forshey admitted to making the boy clean the urine, but she only thought what she did was wrong because she got in trouble, authorities said in the report.
Broward Community Charter School issued a statement saying it acknowledges what occurred and that Forshey was reprimanded.
The victim's mother, Jenay Roberts, did not want to provide a statement Thursday, but attorney Joshua Hertz released the following statement on her behalf:
"The only reason we are bringing this story to the public is to find out if any other child has been treated in this way before. We want to protect this child and possibly any other children that may have been subjected to this form or corporal and unmoral punishment. My client wants to find out why a teacher would allow this to happen. She also asks for her and her son's privacy to be respected and wants her son to retain a normal life back at the school."
Word of Forshey's release did not set well with some parents dropping their children off at the school Thursday morning.
"That teacher should go back to jail. That's not cool," said parent Mark Henrice.
Others believe it was a bad call made by an otherwise good teacher.
"She used really bad judgement, but it's a really good school. I hope it doesn't reflect on the school," parent George Vitieri said.
At Forshey's home Wednesday night, a close family friend and co-worker said Forshey was like a mentor to her.
The woman, who only wanted to be identified as Debbie, said she loved walking into Forshey's classroom because it was so cozy. She also talked about her dedication to teaching.
"She would literally spends nights at the library finding things to do, you know, fun things to do to interact, not just your boring way of teaching," she said.
What Debbie heard on the news came as a shock. She said it's out of character for a woman who does so much for her students, including spend her own money.
"She buys curriculum, she buys games. I mean, I've been with her when she buys all these incentives for the children," she said. "She was actually the main one to get us to like, you know, more positive reinforcement things like that."
