The employment of a former paraprofessional suspended without pay earlier this year for biting a kindergarten student at Len Lastinger was officially terminated by the Tift County Board of Education Monday.

According to BOE Chairman Rita Griffin, Vivian Collier Hightower was removed without pay from her newly assigned position working at the system’s bus shop Friday and her firing Monday is effective immediately.

Tift County School Superintendent Patrick Atwater told the Tifton Gazette Monday morning in an interview in his office that he would be making the recommendation to the board that Hightower’s employment with the school system be severed.

“As superintendent, Patrick Atwater would not have made a recommendation on an employee with a criminal record such as Ms. Hightower’s,” Atwater said.

The BOE met in a special called meeting to discuss selection of a contractor for projects at G.O. Bailey and to discuss the “EBS FCC License” for a planned BOE television channel. After that meeting ended at 1:30 p.m., the board voted to go into executive session to discuss personnel issues. They came back three hours later and adopted the personnel recommendations made by Atwater, including his recommendation that Hightower’s employment be terminated.

Griffin said the majority of time spent in the executive session was to discuss the annual evaluation of Atwater. In the board’s unanimous adoption of personnel recommendation was their decision to approve Atwater’s employment as superintendent for another three years. The board, minus members Erick Willis and Liz Carson Keith, who left before the executive session had ended, voted unanimously to accept the personnel recommendations as a whole. They did not vote with a show of hands on each specific personnel issue, including Hightower’s.

Atwater and Kevin Dobard, the school system’s human resources director, fielded questions in a meeting held Monday morning in Atwater’s office. Atwater told the Tifton Gazette that he wanted to follow up with the incident involving Vivian Collier Hightower “as it relates to recent articles that have been running in the Tifton Gazette.” He said he understood citizens’ concern for the “method in which things may or may not have been handled internally with both current and previous administrations.” Atwater said no one currently employed in the central office was involved in recommendations that HIghtower be hired.

“Ms. Hightower was employed and recommended for employment by previous administrations and I cannot speak for what background checks were or were not done or what questions were or were not asked by the previous administration,” Atwater said.

According to Dobard and Atwater, criminal history background checks are conducted on paraprofessionals and substitute teachers, as well as certified teachers and other personnel, every five years.

Atwater said Dobard had “completed a very thorough background investigation on information with the sheriff’s office very similar to what the Tifton Gazette has completed.”

“We would have to offer thanks to the Tifton Gazette for bringing some things to light that we haven’t had the opportunity or the manpower to research,” Atwater said.

Hightower was arrested on charges of aggravated assault by the Tift County Sheriff’s Office in 2006. The deputy wrote in his report that Hightower was threatening a 23-year-old and that Hightower was holding a machete when he arrived responding to the call. According Capt. Mike Walker of the TCSO’s Criminal Investigation Division, that department completed its investigation into the incident and forwarded it to the district attorney’s office in April 2006. Walker said last week that he had received no word from the district attorney’s office that the case would not go forward through the court system.

Len Lastinger Primary School Principal Dr. Kim Ezekiel maintains that she first learned on Jan. 22 of the Jan. 10 incident involving Hightower biting the finger of a kindergarten student in the car pick-up area of the school. Dobard said the passage of time between the incident and when it was reported by a witness employed by the school system delayed the investigation and ultimate one-week suspension without pay. After her suspension, Hightower again served as a paraprofessional at Len Lastinger.

“We were strictly governed by what was available to us through the personnel file,” Dobard said Monday. “Upon investigation, we learned that there was some information missing. Without having the manpower to actually go down to the courthouse ... we strictly have to rely on what is provided to us by law enforcement.”

Hightower’s former supervisor when she worked at HeadStart in the 1990s told the Tifton Gazette that she dismissed Hightower (who was named Collier at the time) after a teacher reported to her that she had witnessed Hightower hit a child’s hand. Hightower was subsequently charged with making harassing telephone calls intended for a teacher at the center she believed reported the incident to the director of the center. Both the director and the teacher filed incident reports and Hightower was subsequently ordered by a judge not to contact the center or any employees of the center and not be on the property of the center or any employee’s property. She was ordered to serve a 12-month sentence on probation and to pay fines.