Greencastle Elementary School students who testified against their former teacher were clear on one thing: When the instructor got mad, she grasped her hands around their necks, choking them. But the students couldn’t recall much else about what transpired in their first-grade classroom, testifying Tuesday that they couldn’t remember how many times they were choked, when the incidents happened or what sparked them.
The students were testifying in the trial of 36-year-old Susan L. Burke, whose trial on assault charges began Monday in Montgomery County Circuit Court.
One boy testified that Burke choked him in the Silver Spring school, once prompting him to try to call the police from an inoperable pay phone.
“I would have said that I need help because my teacher’s putting her hands around my neck and she’s doing it to other kids, too,” the boy, now 7 years old and in second grade, testified.
He testified that he was choked five times. But in an interview with a detective and social worker, the boy had said it happened three times.
“If it was five times, why did you tell them three?” defense attorney Todd Mohink asked during cross-examination.
“I don’t know,” the boy said.
The boy’s mother said her son told her what happened as she was grounding him for getting in trouble at school. She said she didn’t know whether he was describing the choking because it was true, or because he was being punished.
But, the woman said, her son seems to have been affected.
“When we would go to touch him, he would jump,” she said. The woman said she never saw any bruises or other injuries on her son’s neck.
Another 7-year-old boy testified that he, too, was choked, and rattled off a list of other students who were disciplined the same way. He recalled that Burke once yelled at the class to “shut up,” but couldn’t remember if he or anyone else was choked that day.
The boy said under cross-examination that he had been choked 10 or 20 times, but didn’t recall when or why the incidents happened.
He said the choking happened “all year long.” Burke was placed on leave after the allegations came to light in January.
Burke no longer works for Montgomery, according to a schools spokesman.
