Gyeonggi Province's education office has selected 300 officers whose job is to support teachers facing malicious complaints and child-abuse accusations. It planned to take 50. More than 1,800 people applied, and the office expanded the intake sixfold.
Applications opened on 15 July. There were 1,823 for the original 50 places, about 36 to one. The final 300 are 110 serving teachers, 30 Gyeonggi residents and 160 specialists — lawyers, doctors and police officers, but also conflict mediators, counsellors, a former investigator from the national human rights commission, and a certified behaviour analyst.
They will be posted 96 to southern Gyeonggi, 83 to the west, 63 to the north and 58 to the east. When a child-abuse report, a serious interference with teaching, or a malicious complaint arrives, an officer is assigned one-to-one to the teacher from the first day of the case to its close.
"There are more than a hundred cases of harm to teaching activity a month in Gyeonggi, and over five hundred were filed in the first half of this year alone," superintendent Ahn Min-seok said. "Given the number of schools in the province, this is not an excessive number of people."
Training is set for 13 and 18 August, with the unit formally launching on the 22nd. About 1,400 applicants who were not selected but volunteered will be appointed as unpaid "citizen teaching-rights officers."
On the same day Ahn filed a criminal complaint in his own name against a parent, at Bucheon Ojeong police station. It is the first time since he took office that the province has brought charges against a parent over interference with teaching.
According to the education office, a teacher at Bucheon Ojeong Elementary School had mediated a dispute between pupils and then received continuous complaints from one parent, who also picketed in front of the school. The school's teaching-rights committee found the parent's conduct to be interference. The teacher was subsequently reported to police for child abuse by that parent and sued in a civil court.
Ahn had designated the case the first taken up by the teaching-rights unit he chairs, and had met the teacher and school staff while deciding how to respond. The parent later offered an apology and said the lawsuits would be withdrawn. The complaint went ahead anyway. "I decided to file after long consideration of the position of the teacher and the school," Ahn said. "This is a complaint that shows the superintendent's will not to tolerate shaking a school and threatening a teacher."
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Sourced from Seoul Economic Daily.