Teacher A, who has been teaching for 20 years this year, was a first grade homeroom teacher in 2019 and received several complaints in the process of teaching children who were bullying other children. When he sent a child who had been violent with a friend to the principal’s office, this child’s parent came and demanded an apology for “embarrassing him in front of (other) children,” the teachers’ union alleged. The parent then reported Teacher A to the police on child abuse charges. The child abuse charge was dropped a year later, but teacher A continued to be plagued by malicious complaints from the parents and was receiving psychiatric treatment. At that time, he demanded that the principal hold a meeting of the Committee for the Protection of Teaching Rights, but the committee was never convened. The teachers’ union said, “Teacher A said that the recent incident at Seoul Seo II Elementary School (suicide of an elementary school teacher) brought back the trauma of 2019 and was very painful,” and that “the wounds of teaching rights violations, such as malicious complaints and innocent child abuse, do not disappear just because time passes. In Cheongju City, Chungcheongbuk-do Province, an elementary school teacher in her 30s also died at home on the 7th. The teacher had been undergoing treatment for depression due to difficulties in teaching children’s daily life. Reporters Kim Young-ju and Woo Jeong-sik, Daejeon
