A mom who interrupted a middle school class to confront her daughter’s bullies earlier this year is now being charged with a misdemeanor. The charge is one count of interference with the good order and administration of a school classroom with the intent to disrupt. The mother faces a maximum sentence of one year in jail.
On May 14, Mission Viejo, California mom Christian Chylyn Prince-Tinsley allegedly walked into her daughter’s classroom at Niguel Hills Middle School and began berating and threatening the students. The incident was caught on a cell phone video.
Prince-Tinsley can be heard in the video telling the kids that if they are over 18, she will “[mess] them all up.” “If you all bully my daughter, if you look at her the wrong way, if you breathe the wrong way, send your mom to me,” Prince-Tinsley says in the video.
The enraged mother even asked the teacher to pass out tickets that read “Free ass-kicking. Must be 18 or older to redeem.”
According to the Los Angeles Times, the mother entered the classroom without warning and without checking in at the front office. The instructor phoned the office for assistance, and Prince-Tinsley was escorted off the premises.
Ryan Burris, a spokesman for the Capistrano Unified School District, told the LA Times that Prince-Tinsley reported the bullying to the district prior to the incident, and that an investigation was conducted. He said the district found nothing to substantiate her claims, but that Prince-Tinsley seemed to accept the outcome of the investigation.
Clearly, Prince-Tinsley was not satisfied. In fact, on the day of the incident she told a school administrator that the bullying continued and spread to social media after the investigation closed. Burris said the district would be looking into that.
After being kicked off the school campus in May, Prince-Tinsley seemed to have no regrets about what she did. “Sometimes if you’ve done everything you can do the way you’re supposed to do it and nothing gets resolved, then sometimes you have to decide if you’re willing to go a step forward and deal with the consequences,” she told KCBS-TV. “I was prepared for that, because my daughter is number one.”
Prince-Tinsley said her daughter had been bullied by a group of boys for months, and that she made the decision to storm the classroom after the young girl begged to stay in the car at drop-off. Prince-Tinsley also said her daughter spoke of suicide.
“That’s when Mama Bear mode went into effect,” Prince-Tinsley said.
For his part, Orange County District Attorney Todd Spitzer was not moved. “This incident was way more than an attempt to address accusations of bullying,” he said in a statement. “This was a deliberate act intended to terrorize a room full of young children in the very space where they are supposed to be safe.”
KCBS says some parents at the middle school kept their children at home after the incident.
