The kindergarten teacher began to be suspicious as soon as he heard a man on the sidewalk muttering across the playground.
Teacher Rachel Davis said no to him. If for any reason he wants to enroll, he will have to go to the front door of the school.
Suspicion turned into anxiety when the man disappeared for a minute, returned, and began walking in a circle on a sunny morning on May 11. The man was only about 20 feet away from the 32 kindergarten children outside for a break at Inglewood Elementary School in Nashville.
“You feel like that fish. To play it safely, I said, let’s line up the kids … so that we can all get in.”
The moment the other teacher opened the door, the man jumped over the fence and ran towards the door, Davis said.
“You need to go inside! You need to go inside!” He exclaimed.
Davis was afraid to plant a 5’5, 130-pound body in front of the door and shouted, “No, I can’t get in through this door. I have to leave the playground.”
Davis stopped talking, looked down, and softly said, “I can feel my heart pounding again.”
“The fun of art is to create it.”
Davis wanted to be an elementary school teacher as far as he can remember. She was a kindergarten teacher and loved Drink Wine, who always made school fun.
As a girl who grew up in Charlotte Park, West Nashville, she made small paper notebooks for her dolls. Then Davis sat them side by side and started her lessons, she said.
A few years later, Davis opened a class for his two younger brothers and read them a story. But her brother Daniel and her sister Crystal weren’t as careful as the dolls.
As a high school student at Humefog, Davis volunteered for Artsin Action, a summer program for young students. She remembered that a girl was frustrated when she was making a clay cat because she didn’t look as good as she thought.
“The fun of art is to create it,” Davis told the girl. “It doesn’t have to be the perfect image you have in your mind.”
The girl felt better and began to enjoy art. Davis was fascinated by her teaching.
About a year after graduating from East Tennessee State University, she began working as a Pre-Kindergarten teacher at Inglewood Elementary School in 2015. This is the first year Davis has switched from pre-kindergarten to kindergarten.
‘Run! Get inside now! “
On May 11, Davis and another kindergarten teacher went out with their students at 9:45 am, as usual, at a school playground dedicated to pre-kindergarten and kindergarten classes. ..
On the sidewalk, Davis saw a man about 5 feet 8 inches tall, medium-sized, and perhaps in his thirties, wielding her. She had two 3-foot-high wire mesh fences separating them.
The man tweeted a bit and made his words vague, she said, and it took a while to realize that Davis wanted to go through the playground, maybe entering the building.
Davis thought he might be a parent, and she instructed him to stay on the sidewalk and walk around the building to the front door. There he was able to press the buzzer and tell the office staff what he needed.
The man went away but came back and urged the teachers to start getting students inside, Davis said. About half of the 32 children got inside before the man jumped over the fence.
“Get help!” Davis urged another teacher, and soon, school secretary Katrina “Nikki” Thomas-students call her “Mr. Nikki” -that an intruder would enter. I was standing outside with Davis between the man and the door trying to stop.
“Sir, you can’t go through this door!” Thomas insisted.
Davis trembled. “You can cut the air with a knife. I’m very nervous at this moment.”
Davis said the man rushed towards the door and hit his three children.
So she hid behind him and wrapped her arms around him, squeezing him as hard as she could to prevent him from getting inside.
The Davis students froze, staring at her and the man, yelling, “Run! Get inside now!” Until she yelled at them.
She said the man continued to rush towards the door and eventually entered the stairwell with Davis still wrapping his back.
The man ran away and began running towards the wings of the first grade — and something snapped into Davis.
“I intended to do everything on my own to protect these children, not just the children in kindergarten,” she said. “All these kids feel like my kids.”
Davis chased the man, confronted him, and confronted him. She said they both fell back, crashed into the floor and hit her left elbow on Davis, breaking it.
The intruder got up and Davis, secretary, Thomas, and school bookkeeper Shaquita “Shay” Patton-Thomas detained the man in the corner for more than 10 minutes before police arrived, Davis and Principal Ashley Croft said.
It was a long 10 minutes, Davis said. The four wrestled and confused, alternating between calm and very excited intruders.
The intruder, who smelled alcohol, said he used drugs and added that he was paranoid that someone was out to catch him, Davis said.
“They took their lives.”
When the police arrived, a colleague took Davis to an empty classroom. There, the pain of her elbow fracture and the feelings of her incident overwhelmed her.
“I was completely panicked and shivering, and my feet didn’t want to support my weight,” she said.
“I was very shivering, and my eyes were really big. I was almost in shock after that.”
Davis cast his arm in Ascension St. Thomas Midtown and returned home for six days to recover before returning to the classroom. Her parents and her teacher brought food and gifts to Hendersonville’s house for her and her husband for the next few days.
Staff and parents also praised Davis and staff Thomas and Patton-Thomas for confronting the intruder.
The principal, Croft, said he cried when he watched the surveillance video of the incident.
“Mr. Davis is a very gentle and kind person. What I saw in the video was that she did everything she needed to protect those children,” the principal said. rice field.
“She, Nikki and Shay are heroes. I don’t know what would have happened if they didn’t act. They died for our children.”
A kindergarten mom, Kate Whitley, a small business owner, called Davis a “terrible hero.”
And probably something that is unlikely.
“She’s very petite, organized, color-coded, and logical,” Whitley said of Davis. “I didn’t know that this ferocious lion was lurking there. My daughter wasn’t because she endangered her life.”
The three heroes and their principal are expected to hold an intruder hearing in court on Tuesday on charges of assault and trespassing.
Davis and Croft said they didn’t know how to feel again in the same room as the intruder.
“He wasn’t trying to hurt anyone, but people were still hurt and fear was real,” Croft said.
Davis said she is now flirting when she is in public and a person with unstable legs begins to walk towards her. And she’s still uncomfortable at the playground during breaks.
Davis had a brief conversation with a school mental health professional, but since then he has had a hard time planning further treatment to handle the case.
But she had a powerful and healing moment on the first day. Her first walk her student that day hugged her in a hurry and she began to sob. Davis also cried.
“We were hugging at this very moment when the tears spilled,” she said.
“And he just said I was very happy because I was back.”
Contact Brad Schmitt at [email protected] or 615-259-8384 or Twitter @ bradschmitt.
This article was originally published in Nashville, Tennessee. Elementary School Intruder: Meet the kind teacher who worked on him