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Two B.C. teachers will serve suspensions for inappropriate interactions with students.
Douglas Andrew Barnim, who is a high school teacher in a B.C. independent school, has been suspended a month for exchanging intimate text messages with a former student who was still a minor.
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Barnim signed a consent resolution agreement with the B.C. Commissioner for Teacher Regulation earlier this month in which he admits his behaviour amounted to professional misconduct.
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During the 2018-19 school year, Barnim sent a string of inappropriate text messages to a student after graduation saying the student was his favourite, making comments about other students in the graduating class and telling the student he hoped they could remain in touch.
He said the two “were now friends and would be friends for life,” and gave advice to the student about dating and made comments about sex-related topics.
He also noted that “being underage has never stopped anyone from going to the pub.”
The exchanges made the student “very uncomfortable,” according to the signed agreement.
The commissioner decided a one-month suspension was appropriate because Barnim’s conduct showed he didn’t understanding appropriate professional boundaries.
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And a teacher in the Maple Ridge-Pitt Meadows school district agreed to a three-day suspension after admitting he angrily struck a student in the abdomen during a metal shop class in May 2021.
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Randy Peter Faresin signed a consent resolution agreement in September admitting to his misconduct.
Faresin was volunteering in a metal class for Grade 12 students who were being evaluated by the welding certification bureau in BCIT’s metal fabrication program.
A student admitted to having a grinder at a work station that didn’t have a protective guard on it, leaving a sharp blade exposed. The grinder wasn’t in use but it was unclear whether it was plugged in.
“Faresin angrily asked whose grinder it was,” said the agreement, then approached and “made physical contact with the student’s abdomen with his hand.”
He “proceeded to loudly lecture” the student for leaving the blade exposed and said the contact he’d made with the student’s stomach “was nothing compared to what (the student) would have experienced” had he been injured by the blade.
The district initially suspended Faresin for five days without pay in December 2021 and he was ordered to take a workshop on professional boundaries and go to counselling.
The commissioner determined a further three-day suspension was appropriate because Faresin failed to model appropriate behaviour expected of a teacher by “engaging in unwarranted physical contact with a student,” showing a lack of understanding of professional boundaries.
He will serve the suspension in mid-December.
jruttle@postmedia.com
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