Principal's claims infuriate parents

Jackie White

Victim’s mum speaks out over disgraced teacher’s actions

Parents of a schoolgirl psychologically abused by her headmistress are furious that she has denied targeting their daughter.

Auckland woman Jackie White continues to deny obsessing over their daughter despite being kicked out of teaching for an inappropriate relationship with the 17-year-old.

In an exclusive interview with the Herald on Sunday, the mother of the high-achieving student said she was livid that White broke suppression orders this week to out herself on a TV3 current affairs show and to minimise the findings of the Teachers Disciplinary Tribunal against her.

In an interview on 3rd Degree, White said she pretended she was dying of cancer to get close to the mother, not her former student.

The mother, whose name is suppressed to protect her daughter's identity, said White continued to mislead despite being found guilty this year on 29 counts and stripped of her teaching credentials.

White was censured and her registration cancelled after the disciplinary tribunal found she feigned a terminal disease to forge an inappropriate relationship with the Year 13 student.

She also deceived management at two Auckland schools over her health crisis.

Said the mother: "I have kept quiet and now I just think I can't let this eat away at me and I have this moral responsibility to my daughter.

"She had been brave enough to go to the New Zealand Teachers Council to report this and then she [White] has made out she [the student] has made it up as if it hasn't even happened."

Last night, White told the Herald on Sunday she stood by her account. She conceded she had psychologically and emotionally abused the student, and sincerely regretted it, but felt she had been punished enough.

However, the mother said texts from the disgraced principal to her daughter show her encouraging the student to miss school and spend the day with her.

White confessed school meetings were "an excuse to spend time with you" and professed her love for the student.

"She singled her out, she took her out for coffees, she tricked us to have her stay over at her house, she gave her gifts and she wrote to her saying how much she loved her."

The mother said White emailed her daughter from Germany, where she claimed she was receiving treatment for cancer.

She told her how she was keeping her alive and was imagining holding the teenager.

The mother said White, posing as a German doctor treating his dying patient, asked her teenage daughter to make a decision about turning off life support.

"What she did was terrible," said the mother.

She said she was speaking out because she feared White would repeat her abuse.

The mother said her traumatised family were considering moving to England.

Her daughter had been accepted at a top English university and was due to start studies later this year.