12/4/2014 Sky News
A classroom assistant who bullied a seven-year-old girl for five months has been found guilty of child cruelty.
Rachael Regan, 43, taped the pupil to her chair, shut her in a storeroom and tied her shoes on with string.
Bradford Crown Court heard that Regan “singled out” the girl at the school in Calderdale, West Yorkshire.
Her bullying campaign also included sticking Post-it notes to her thumbs to stop her sucking them, kicking her chair, calling her a nickname, hiding her doll and tearing up a photograph of her.
Regan spent more than a year on bail before being charged and her victim is now nine. Judge Neil Davey QC said the girl had waited “a quarter of her lifetime” to give evidence.
An investigation was launched by the school and the police after the girl told her mother a teacher had tied her to a chair with sticky tape in front of other pupils.
The woman, who cannot be named, said her daughter “clung” to her “for dear life” and was in tears after it happened.
“(My daughter) just came rushing out and hugged me and tears were just rolling down her face,” the woman said.
“It was just so heartbreaking to see her like that because (she) is so bubbly and outgoing and I have never seen my daughter so upset.”
Other staff members said they had seen some of the incidents. One support assistant said that after the girl was taped to the chair, Regan went to another classroom to show another teaching assistant what she had done.
She then told her colleague: “She’ll not get up and wander around the classroom now.”
A teacher, Deborah McDonald, 41, was found not guilty of the same offence. The two women hugged after she was cleared.
Regan will be sentenced in January but she will not go to prison because of delays between the incidents and the trial.
DCI Darren Minton, of Calderdale Police, said: “This person was employed in a position of trust and she broke that trust with her actions.”
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