High School Teacher Admits to Verbal and Emotional Abuse of Student

By Ryan Flanagan
CTV
February 23, 2017

http://kitchener.ctvnews.ca/high-school-teacher-admits-to-verbal-and-emotional-abuse-of-student-1.3298666

A Kitchener teacher was suspended from his job without pay for one month last summer after admitting to professional misconduct.

Matthew Kras was accused of verbally, emotionally and sexually abusing a student.

He pleaded guilty to professional misconduct over the emotional and verbal abuse, but did not admit to sexual abuse and is no longer facing that allegation.

Matthew Kras is seen in this photograph taken from Facebook.

In addition to the suspension, his penalty included a public reprimand from the Ontario College of Teachers and having to take a training course on appropriate boundaries.

The accusations dated back to early 2014, and involved a student in Kras’ co-op class.

According to an agreed statement of facts – a document that offers an accounting of the events that both Kras and the student agree with – Kras “began to engage in inappropriate texting and personal conversations” with the student during the evening hours.

In April 2014, the student sent Kras a message saying “I think I want to hook up with you.” Kras did not respond to that message or report it to school administrators.

Eventually he ended up phoning the student, saying something along the lines of “I think you are a likable person, but I won’t be able to hook up with you.”

The next morning, he pulled the student out of the classroom to talk, telling her that “We all have wants, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”

That night, the two again sent each other messages, with the student saying that Kras had said he wanted to hook up with her.

Kras said he wanted to “put that behind us.”

“Needs and wants are separate things,” he said.

“I was trying to say that we all have wants.”

Kras was initially suspended from his job for three days by the Waterloo Catholic District School Board.

Kras currently works at Resurrection Catholic Secondary School in Kitchener. He did not reply to multiple requests for comment before this story was published.