Photo/Illutration Takeshi Nishimura, the head of the secretariat for Yasu city’s board of education, center, apologizes for a teacher’s verbal bullying of a student in the city’s government office building in Shiga Prefecture on Sept. 29. (Kazuo Matsuura)

YASU, Shiga Prefecture--A municipal elementary school here admitted that a homeroom teacher bullied a second-grader by repeatedly mocking him and telling other students to ignore him.

“We apologize to the student and his parents for making them suffer,” Takeshi Nishimura, the head of the secretariat for the city’s board of education, said on Sept. 29. 

From May to July, the homeroom teacher in his 50s often told the boy, “You don’t really know the words,” when the student asked the meaning of those that the teacher spoke in a class, according to the education board.

The teacher said, “let’s ignore him” several times.

He also said, “I’m going to give a word quiz not to everyone, but only to him, who doesn’t know the words.”

Other students began to copy the teacher, saying, “Let’s ignore him” and “You don’t even know those words.”

The teacher told the boy’s parent at a parent-teacher conference in July that “your child has an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) so he should undergo developmental testing as soon as possible.”

The son told his parents about the verbal abuse who reported the teacher’s conduct to the education board.

The school investigated the complaint and the teacher admitted that he had verbally abused his student. The school determined that the teacher’s actions constitute bullying.

The principal and teacher apologized to the boy’s parents. The homeroom teacher was replaced.

The teacher has been on leave since the second semester, claiming poor health, according to the education board.

“We will make efforts to prevent the same thing from occurring by holding an anti-bullying workshop (for teachers),” Nishimura said.

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