Teacher Resigns After Sending Home 5-Year-Old Special Needs Student With Bag of Human Feces

Elementary school teacher Sue Graham in Yakima, Washington has resigned after being reprimanded for sending a bag of human feces home with a five-year-old student from her special education class. She sent home the feces with a sticky note reading “This little turd was found on the floor in my room.” Her husband, Ron Graham, also resigned.


Sue Graham had been a teacher for 31 years.

The father reported the incident and admitted that he was called to the classroom a couple of times to help the boy clean up after himself after using the restroom. However, he said that his son had never had an accident in class.

Personally, I have never had occasion in my teaching career to send human waste home with a student. I do recall while at the University of Chicago, one of my teachers was at a loss to tell one of my friends how bad his Spanish language skills were. When my friend opened up the envelope with his final paper, he found a rotten piece of broccoli stapled to the corner with a note saying “I was at a loss to explain how bad your language skills are until, while walking to campus this morning, I saw this rotten piece of broccoli in the gutter outside of a restaurant. I immediately thought, ‘That is how bad his language skills are!'” It is not quite a bag of human waste, but close.

For the story, click here.

30 thoughts on “Teacher Resigns After Sending Home 5-Year-Old Special Needs Student With Bag of Human Feces”

  1. lottakatz….
    I do too…she was a nasty piece of work personality wise, and also had a very intimidating physical stature!

    Simone….
    Probably good advice, lol

  2. OH! I just remembered after reading the above comments. Raising some farm boys, I sent them off to school without a second thought.

    About the third day of school, the teacher comes to me in an absolute panic “your son urinated on the playground at recess behind the tire swing.” The lady was totally in freak mode and my kid was standing there humiliated. I was thinking “geez lady he’s a farm boy. When you got to go, you go.”

    He was a gentleman about it, right? He went behind the tire swing so he showed some modesty. And to his credit he was only four years old!

    Anyway, I’m glad reading the comments reminded me of this. I’m going to find the right moment to tell my little boy that a lot of teachers are just big dumb jerks and he doesn’t ever have to give it a second thought.

  3. Canadian Eh, I hope that teacher fealt real bad about what she did for a loooooong time.

  4. Simone Benedict: “Thankfully I never had a humiliating experience involving bodily fluids, but I had plenty of other life-altering humiliations at the hands of many sadistic teachers.”

    —-Amen to that, I was never a happy camper at school and my memories of school-as-horrorshow begin in Kindergarten. Man school can really mess you up.

    Mile S, A similar event happened with a schoolmate of mine in about the 3rd or 4th grade, stomach flue type of thing- it was awful and caused a mess the teacher and class had to live with until the janitor cleaned it up.

    The one good thing about it was that whenever my classmate would again raise her hand outside of the rote Q & A training we were given the teacher would say ‘you’re excused’ before the student even asked. She was excused even if that wasn’t why she raised her hand. It was a gold plated ‘get out of jail free’ card even if she could only spend time to herself in the girls lavatory. I was quite envious of the way that incident worked out for her.

    Your dad sounds like a real gem.

  5. I have to assume that a teacher who goes out of their way to humiliate a student in the first place would never have enough empathy to have a second thought about it. However, Simones’ comment reminded me of a humiliating situation that I had the great opportunity of witnessing at the tender age of 8.
    I grew up in Montreal, and took french from kindergarden up, and went to school with children from different ethnicities…many of whom were new to the country and spole little english and no french. Anyhow, I remember a little ( I mean tiny ) boy named Parminder. His family had moved from India to Montreal during the summer before we started grade 3. One day, early in the year, while in french class, Parminder put his hand up and struggled in english to ask our monster of a french teacher if he could use the rest room. She screamed at him to ask in french, adding that he could not go until he asked in french. Needless to say, the poor little guy sat at his chair where he eventually wet himself. To add insult to injury, this nasty demon then ordered him to get paper towel and clean up his mess…..in french of course. He had no idea what she had said, and continued to sit there, head bowed and now crying. She then stomped to his desk with a roll of brown paper towel and spoke the words in french while modelling what he needed to do. He did eventually follow through with her demands, and went home soon after we were back in our regular classroom. Fast track to the end of the school year, when Parminder was hit and killed by a car as he was crossing the street. No, the nasty teacher was not the driver, however I remember thinking about him often while sitting in that classroom with that same french teacher for the next 4 years, and wondering if she ever felt bad for what she had put that poor little boy through! Obviously it had a huge impact, I’m still thinking about it some 30 + years later!

  6. Thankfully I never had a humiliating experience involving bodily fluids, but I had plenty of other life-altering humiliations at the hands of many sadistic teachers.

    Do they ever later have a brief passing thought…I wonder if that kid ever had to get therapy because of me?

  7. ‘Thank you, I know I was blessed. My father also went to my high School when I was slapped by a Spanish Teacher and had him publicly apologize to me. By the way if I screwed up, my parents would take issue with me. ‘
    Mike,
    very very good parents indeed….for both above mentioned reasons!

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