By
Bill Bush
A 47-year-old Columbus City Schools employee was fired last night, after she lost her cool last
month and got into a fight with a student.
The Board of Education fired Sheila Glover, who had worked for the district for more than a
decade and was paid $21,500 a year as an instructional assistant.
On March 9, Glover was aggressive and hostile to a student at Alum Crest High School, a school
for students with emotional and behavioral problems. According to documents provided in response to
an Ohio Public Records Act request filed by
The Dispatch, Glover called the girl names, provoking her and engaging in a fight that had
to be broken up by staff members.
The student acknowledged striking Glover first, after Glover “got in my face.”
“I told her to get out of my face, and I smacked her,” the student is quoted in one document. “
She slapped me back in my face, and then we started fighting.”
The student’s identity was redacted from the documents because of federal student-privacy laws.
Her age and grade are not noted in the reports; the documents didn’t reveal whether the student
faced any punishment for striking Glover.
After last night’s meeting, Superintendent Gene Harris said she wasn’t familiar with all the
details of the incident.
“Things have happened, and so we’ve responded,” Harris said.
Before the fight, Glover had made inappropriate comments about the student’s hair, witnesses
said.
“I have hair,” Glover said, according to one witness. “I have more hair than you. I can buy you
some hair.”
A bus driver and another aide who witnessed the fight “physically took hold of Glover and
escorted her away from” the student, according to the documents.
After taking up to 45 minutes to calm down, Glover told school officials that the student had
tried to kick her and that she was shocked when the student struck her. The student had a history
of assaulting the staff, Glover said, and she denied striking the girl or saying anything to
provoke the student.
Glover couldn’t be reached last night for comment.
In other business last night, the board also fired a food-service worker. Documents released in
that case show that food-service administrators showed up at Mifflin Middle School in February and
ordered Gregory Fountain into a car to be taken to a drug-testing facility.
Fountain refused, stating he had not shown any signs of being intoxicated and didn’t know why
they wanted to test him. Fountain, 50, said at an administrative hearing that he never refused to
take the test but wanted to know what his legal rights were.
The district charged that Fountain violated a signed agreement for upholding a drug-free
workplace policy by refusing to submit to the test. Fountain had worked for the district since
2005. He made $9,600 from the district during the 2010-11 school year, records show.
Neither Fountain nor his union president could be reached for comment late yesterday.
Dispatch reporter Jennifer Smith Richards contributed to this story.
bbush@dispatch.com
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