COWETA COUNTY, Ga. — Two staff members at Elm Street Elementary School in Coweta County are on administrative leave after accusing each other of mistreating special needs students.
And now, we’ve learned the school's principal has been disciplined for not reporting the complaints to Newnan police sooner.
Only 11Alive’s Kaitlyn Ross spoke to the paraprofessional who says the complaint against her is retaliation for bringing the alleged abuse to light.
Nicole Marshall says it was weeks before the school took action, and then, only after she filed the complaints against the teacher.
She says she feels she’s being unfairly targeted now because she was a whistleblower.
"I've been sick. It's a travesty," Marshall said.
She said she thought she was doing the right thing.
Marshall says that when she witnessed what she thought was child abuse, she went to the front office to report what she had seen.
In emails shared with 11Alive, she told the school principal she witnessed the special needs teacher put her hands around a student's neck.
She wrote she that saw the teacher throw a shoe at another child's face, as well as pinching a third child on the arm.
But, Marshall says that after those three reports, the teacher was not removed from the classroom.
"All I could think, because this was so shocking and so scary, for everyone in the classroom, all I could think was, I've made a report, and no one is helping us. I thought, do I dial 911? I don't know what to do?" she said.
She says the school principal did not alert police until three weeks after she filed the first report. And then, the accused teacher filed a counteraccusation against her.
"That's ridiculous, that's absurd. We have so much respect for her for standing up for our child and our children, we are speechless over this... it's a travesty," said Melissa Wilson, parent of a daughter who is in that class.
Four families told us they’ve pulled their children out of the special needs classroom, not just over the allegations, but over how they were handled.
A district spokesperson told 11Alive the principal was suspended for two days for not reporting the complaints soon enough -- and was removed from the school for five days to undergo training.
The district says it forwarded their investigation to Newnan Police to see if a state law was broken.
The law requires a school to file a report with police with 24 hours of an allegation.
"I've had to remove my children from the school because I feel like she's not capable of properly reporting child abuse," another parent, Jillian Wooten, said.
The district told 11Alive they cannot comment on the specific allegations, but during any investigation, the people accused are placed on administrative leave until it is concluded.
That's not good enough for Marshall.
"This whole thing has been handled so badly, I'm being seen as a child abuser when all I was trying to do was protect the kids in my class," she said.
The Newnan Police Department told us this is an open criminal investigation, so they could not comment on any of the accusations.
They did not have a timeline for when the investigation will be complete.
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