A business leader is "shocked" after a teacher of 40 years was charged with "serious misconduct" for removing the earphones of a student.
Greg Robinson, 72, who has been a teacher for 40 years, was working as a relief maths teacher at Mt Maunganui College on October 16, 2019.
Two male year-10 students were sharing headphones of the earbud variety with one of them taping and drumming away to music.
Robinson asked the student to stop but he declined the request, so the teacher tried unsuccessfully to take the phone away. Following this, Robinson went to remove the earbud from the student's ear, which led to them breaking.
The student stood up and had a verbal altercation with Robinson, who then left to get another teacher.
The incident ended up in the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal, which found Robinson had engaged in serious misconduct by removing the headphones unexpectedly and recklessly.
The tribunal said Robinson's actions were likely to adversely impact the student’s well-being and could've brought the teaching profession into disrepute.
Former Auckland Business Chamber chief executive Michael Barnett told AM on Thursday it shows schools have "lost sight" of what education is all about.
"I think it has to be the question was that the culture that existed in the school, and if it is, have we lost sight of what school is all about?
"The principal of what the teacher was doing is right. He may have gone about it the right way. He may need to be told this should've happened differently and he may need to do some training, but to be taken through a disciplinary process and the cost of that, both the humiliation and the material costs, my mind is excessive."
Advertising Guru Vaughn Davis, who was appearing alongside Barnett on AM's panel, said the school had let Robinson down.
"I feel maybe that he's been a little bit let down on this in a lot of ways. Firstly, to walk in as a reliever to a school where the culture seems to be that you can sit and listen to music, that's a bit sad," Davis told AM.
"For the process to have gone the way it did, I think it's just a bit of a disappointing end to what is a career that we should be celebrating. We're short of teachers, get more 72-year-old maths relieving teachers back into the classroom."
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