B.C. teacher who told exchange students to 'go back to working on rice farms' suspended 3 days

CBC News


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A high school teacher in B.C. has been suspended for less than a week after making a number of sexually explicit, rude and inappropriate comments toward students over the course of a single school year.

Klaus Hardy Breslauer cannot teach from Wednesday until Friday of this week for negative and aggressive behaviour toward students, according to the B.C. Commissioner for Teacher Regulation, including one instance in which he told exchange students "they should go back to working on rice farms."

Breslauer admitted to a catalog of poor behaviour over the 2017/18 school year in a consent resolution agreement posted Tuesday.

Breslauer, who was teaching in Vancouver at the time, told another student to "go back to the Philippines if they were not prepared to try" in class. A third student, whose father was from Iran, was told they would be "sent out in the minefields" in Iran if they did not get good grades.

The agreement said Breslauer also asked a student of Japanese descent if they were unable to answer a question because they had been watching too much hentai, or anime pornography.

Breslauer was teaching Science 9, Science 10 and Physics 11 at the time.

In the list of misconduct outlined in the consent resolution agreement, Breslauer also:

• Accused students of cheating and told them they deserved to contract sexually transmitted diseases for doing so;
• Refused to give a Grade 10 student permission to use the bathroom because "you cannot run away from life's problems";
• Told students they would end up at "loser Langara," a reference to Vancouver's Langara College, if they did not improve their marks;
• "Frequently" discussed his personal life and sex life with students;
• Said boys are gifted at rubbing rods and he had a lot of experience doing so, during a science experiment involving black rods;
• Acted rudely and dismissively toward students' parents;
• Allowed students to fill out part of their own report cards because he was too lazy to do it himself.

Breslauer also had more than 700 racist, homophobic, sexist and transphobic memes on his work computer, some of which he created himself and shared with students.

Students also saw a photograph of Beslauer and his wife, apparently nude behind a newspaper, after the teacher posted the picture on his public Facebook page.

Breslauer resigned from the Vancouver School District in November 2018.

For all of his misconduct, the branch suspended his teacher certificate for three days. His teaching licence is invalid on May 27, 28 and 29 — a time at which most in-class instruction across B.C. is still suspended due to the pandemic.

The agreement said Breslauer has previously been suspended without pay in 2008 and 2009, in one case after making discriminatory, offensive and threatening remarks.

The teacher's union in this province is far, far too powerful. We had a teacher put her hands around a kid's neck in anger once and didn't get any punishment.