Special needs teacher charged with putting student in a trash-can says that she was “just joking.”

It was “just a joke,” said a special needs teacher accused of lowering an autistic second-grader headfirst into a trashcan.

Mary Katherine Pursley, who is charged with child cruelty, recently faced a tribunal, 11Alive reports. She requested the tribunal so that she could fight for her job.

The panel is made up of retired educators who will determine whether the district has grounds to fire Pursley for incompetency and insubordination.

Pursley, who does not deny that the incident happened, got a chance to explain her side of the story.

“I had a strong hold of him – he wasn’t flailing around or anything,” she said. “I had a strong hold of him. He was crying. He was screaming already, very loudly.”

Pursley said that she took action because the student – referred to as “T” – was hitting other students and screaming. The incident occurred at Mt. Bethel Elementary School in Georgia.

“She told him that he, if he was continuing to talk trashy – that trash talk, trashy behaviour – [he] belonged in the trash can,” said Lynne Parry, a special education paraprofessional at Mt. Bethel.

Pursley saying during her testimony that she used a reference to Oscar the Grouch from Sesame Street, telling him she wanted to “shake it out.”

“I went like this,” she said as she began to describe how she picked the boy up with his legs over her arms and his shoulder on her left arm.

“Was he facing up or facing down or facing sideways?” she was asked.

“He was facing up,” Pursley replied. “He was looking at me in the face.”

She described her relationship with “T” to the tribunal as a loving, joking one, but a district investigator says the boy viewed the incident differently.

“In his testimony to me, he did not take it as being ‘joking,’” said investigator Chris Dowd. “He did not see it as being teased.

“His demeanor changed. He clenched his fist and got visibly angry and started, ‘She makes me so angry; I just want to get away from her.’”

The tribunal will make a recommendation to the Cobb School Board, which will be the deciding factor of whether Pursley will continue teaching. The panel has until Friday to make a decision.