By Francine Black, Staff Reporter

A six-year-old child has been left traumatised and is now refusing to attend school after she was taken to the police station when a teacher's cellular phone was stolen in a recent incident.

The child, who attends a primary school in rural St. Ann, has been having sleepless nights after the incident, which has caused her to be labelled a phone thief by her peers, because the phone was stolen from the teacher's handbag that she was left to watch.

Jacqueline Morris, the child's mother, says that she is very upset about the situation especially since her daughter has not been found guilty of the allegations. "I was at school (university) when my mother call me and said she (her daughter) come home from school crying ... and they took her to the police station," she said.

Phone missing

The series of events started last Thursday, when the child was at school and was left by her teacher to watch her handbag. Morris says that while watching the bag, her daughter wanted to urinate and left it and went to the rest room. However, when the teacher returned later to find her cellular phone missing, the six-year-old was one of those questioned.

The teacher is said to have then taken it a step further and took the child and some other students to the Alexandria Police Station where they were allegedly questioned about the telephone's disappearance.

A district constable from the station confirmed that the students were taken there, but said they were spoken to by an officer and sent away. "The teacher took the children to the station and all we did was talk to students about it. No further action was taken against them," he said.

However, when the students returned to school, the child was singled out by students who started calling her "phone tief". That night when the child went home, her mother said it showed that she was obviously traumatised.

"When I went home, she wake up in the night and shout out, 'Mi nuh tief di phone,'" Morris said. She has not returned to school since the incident. Now her mother is considering moving her to another school, but is still angry with the way the situation was handled. "I am thinking about getting her into counselling, but what the teacher did was wrong. She did not even call the parents to come in and discuss the situation," she said.

In the meantime, the news team has been unable to get a response from the principal as several calls to the school went unanswered. When THE STAR spoke to the guidance counsellor at the institution, we were referred to the principal. We were also unable to get a comment from the Ministry of Education.