Fired Riley teacher defends rep after knife incident

Here’s Ms. Mariotti’s version of the how the knife incident unfolded:

She and her students were in a hallway Nov. 11, heading to their classroom when she honed in on some chatter among the students. She overheard that one of them had a weapon. As the class settled in the room, Ms. Mariotti said, she pulled that student aside.

After the child initially denied having a knife, she got him to admit to it, and he turned the weapon over.

She instructed the student to return to his seat and she called security.

“You need to take this student, and I have something to give you,” she recalled telling the guard while slipping him the knife.

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Ms. Mariotti said she initially thought the student wanted to show off the weapon to classmates during recess and was relieved the student didn’t injure himself or others. A couple of days later, she said, she learned an attack had been “planned.”

When asked by the News-Review if she had noticed any issues among the students prior to the incident, Ms. Mariotti said she hadn’t.

“I was shocked,” she said.

After the incident, the intended victim was moved to a different class, and Ms. Mariotti welcomed the two accused boys back into her classroom when their suspensions ended in February.

“I said ‘I’m good with kids with needs. It will be fine,’ ” she recalled. “I got an aide and then we started.”

But Ms. Mariotti described her job as stressful at the time, mainly because district officials instructed her not to talk about the knife incident, so she had no way to offer guidance to concerned parents and students.

She had no help dealing with the “elephant in the classroom” — students not wanting to be near the two boys who had planned the attack.

“The kids I had were scared and were like, ‘Do they have it again?’ ” she said.

She disagrees with the administration’s decision not to notify parents about what had happened and feels there’s a public perception that she did something wrong. The district has remained virtually silent about the incident.