A district attorney will not press charges against a former Maine superintendent who is accused of physically restraining a student at an elementary school last September, according to the Sun Journal.
Monica Henson, the former Oxford Hills School District superintendent, was filling in as principal at Agnes Gray Elementary and is accused of grabbing a student by the arm and pulling him into an office.
Henson said at the time she used “a limited restraint technique for a loudly disruptive student so as not to allow disruption of an entire hallway of classrooms.”
At a meeting in January, an ed tech at the school claimed she saw the incident, and that after pulling the child into the office, the child fell down and the superintendent fell on top of him.
Henson said that fall never happened, saying in an email, “At no time did the child fall, and I did not fall on top of him. This is corroborated by the eyewitness statements of the cafeteria manager and the custodian, both of him [sic] were actually physically present and gave their accounts to the investigators.”
She goes on to say those who claim to be eyewitnesses were not actually there. “The school building is very old and not equipped with cameras, so there is no video to contradict their false statements.”
Henson called the claims “character assassination.”
She resigned in April. The district said it would pay Henson $174,500 as part of a resignation agreement. Oxford Hills also agreed to pay $5,500 for her attorney fees.
In her resignation letter, Henson wrote “I am proud of the changes I was able to implement and the management changes I made.”
