PLEASANT HILL, Ill. — An 8-year-old boy’s day in music class turned into a scene of pain and fear that has left his family wrestling with unanswered questions and a tight-knit Illinois village talking about school safety. On November 5, 2025, Ryder Smith was at Pleasant Hill Elementary School when a routine moment went horribly wrong, according to his mother, Bethany Smith. Contemporary online accounts from local parents and social posts confirm what the family describes as an alarming encounter between Ryder and his music teacher.
Ryder’s trouble began with a bent chair leg in music class. In the small school’s bustling preschool-through-grade-5 environment, that kind of thing happens: little hands work at big problems. Ryder tried to fix the chair himself, flipping it over to straighten the bent leg. His mother says that’s when the teacher lost his temper. Rather than asking Ryder what was going on, the teacher allegedly began yelling and then seized the boy by both shoulders and hurled him backward. Wheeler-like in a bad storybook, young Ryder hit a classroom table and fell to the floor in pain.
While Ryder lay crying on the classroom floor, the family says, the teacher turned up the volume on the room’s music and continued to scold him loudly. The boy was reportedly told to stay on the floor until class ended. Witnesses — other students in the room — later described similar versions of events to the family, which strengthened the mother’s belief that what happened wasn’t just a misunderstanding.
Bethany Smith said the principal, who also serves as the superintendent for the small Pleasant Hill Community Unit School District, never called her about the incident. Instead, she was told to reach out to the high school’s dean of students, a person her family had never met, for details about what happened to her son. She only learned the specifics of the situation from another student, not school administrators.
The family reported the incident to the local sheriff’s office. Initially, they were told charges might be pursued and that the teacher could be arrested. But the case was later transferred to the Illinois State Police. Then the family says they were informed no criminal charges would be filed — with no clear explanation offered for that decision.
When the Smiths asked for an official record of the incident from school officials, what they received was described as a “referral report,” in which the teacher wrote that he had merely “removed” Ryder from his chair — a point of dispute between the family and the district’s account. In the wake of the episode, the mother also shared that this was not an isolated concern. Earlier in the school year, she says another teacher in the district resigned after multiple complaints of abusive conduct from parents and students.
In late December, an email from the superintendent/principal informed the Smith family that the teacher involved would be back in the classroom on January 5, 2026, and that the matter was considered closed as the district geared up for the second semester. In a public social media post, Bethany wrote that her son is now terrified to return to school and that she is equally frightened to send him back. The family says they are pursuing legal action and will continue pushing for transparency and stronger student protections.
