Socialites… get into this. A middle school teacher in Tallahassee, Florida was arrested for allegedly organizing a string of fights inside her classroom and telling students “no screaming, no yelling, no phones.”
23-year-old Angel Footman, who is vehemently denying the allegations made against her, is accused of planning the brawls and failing to take any sort of action to stop the altercations or even report them to administrators, per the recently filed court documents.
It was on March 24 when a resource deputy at the Griffin Middle School got word of what was allegedly happening in Footman’s classroom, with officials later uncovering several videos of the fights that Tok placed between March 22 and March 23, despite Footman allegedly having told the students not to record the violent attacks on each other.
Court docs obtained by WCTV claim that a handful of sixth-grade girls confessed to detectives that they had participated in fights during the hours they were supposed to be learning in the classroom, adding that Footman had allegedly invited them back for more fights.
In one of the videos reviewed by police, the teacher is said to have been sitting at her desk amid a brawl between students as she told the rest of the class, “no screaming, no nothing.” Despite the physical altercations, even if Footman claims to have had no involvement in setting the fights up between the sixth-graders, there was no evidence proving that she ever reported one of the alleged many fights that went down in her classroom.
Footman later admitted that she should have reported the incidents to school officials but failed to do so for reasons she couldn’t explain. She’s now been hit with four counts of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and was arrested on Friday. According to the New York Post, she was released shortly after but is expected to be arraigned on the aforementioned charges on May 4.
It remains unclear as to how many alleged fights actually took place in Footman’s classroom, but docs continue to reveal that each time students would go at it with one another, the teacher would give them 30 seconds during each brawl and strictly forbid girls to pull each other’s hair.
If a student wasn’t happy with the outcome of the fight, Footman is said to have encouraged them to a rematch, having more or less treated her classroom as a boxing pit and subsequently creating a toxic and hostile learning environment for the teens.
During her upcoming court appearance, Footman will be quizzed as to why she wasn’t able to report the incidents to administrators since she already admitted to failing to alert officials when she was present during these fights.