Student in Jiza claims teacher’s bus hit him on purpose, syndicate disputes claim

AMMAN — A student from a school in south Amman’s Jiza District has claimed that a teacher purposely hit him with a bus, breaking his leg, after a fight erupted between students of two schools, the Jordan Teachers Association (JTA) said Thursday.

On Tuesday, a fight broke out after a football match between students from Natal and Arenbah Al Gharbeyah secondary schools in the district, as part of a football league in the area, the JTA said in a statement.

To break up the brawl, the teacher in question took Arenbah Al Gharbeyah students in his bus to preserve the safety of everyone, according to the statement.

In response, the student involved in the incident, who is from Natal school, attempted to stop the teacher from leaving and kept kicking the bus “until his leg broke”, the syndicate said.

The student’s parent, however, filed a complaint with security officials against the teacher, claiming he purposely hit his son.

The police detained the school’s principal and the teacher, but the JTA branch in Amman bailed the principal out of jail. 

The teacher is still in custody because the parents did not drop the complaint, the statement said.

In March, the JTA said it registered four cases of assaults against teachers in Jiza in the span of two months.

In previous remarks to The Jordan Times, Abdul Rahman Zaben, a JTA member in the district, attributed the assaults to “the lack of strict security measures against perpetrators”.

Area residents, he said, disapprove of the ministry’s recent regulations that ban General Secondary Certificate Examination (Tawjihi) students from sitting for exams if they exceed the allowed absences, as well as its measures to prevent cheating during Tawjihi.

Students in the district used to pass Tawjihi by cheating via mobile phones, Zaben said, noting that the passing rate of the Tawjihi winter session this year was close to zero.

Some 14,300 students study at the district’s 102 schools, according to Zaben.