A Lower Mainland teacher was ordered to take training after dragging a student by their ankles.

Sau Yiu Velda Chan was an inclusion support teacher at the Mission school, and it was both this incident and her phone use in class that landed her in hot water with the province’s regulator for teachers.

She was supporting a grade one student with disabilities while the class was in a January 2023 physical education class.

The student had lain down on their stomach “in a manner that disrupted” the class. Chan responded by grabbing the student by their ankles and pulling the student, according to a decision by the BC Commissioner for Teacher Regulation.

The decision did not say the student was harmed.

Throughout that year, there were also three occassions where Chan was looking at her phone while supervising students. She was checking messages from other teaching staff, but she was “not always noticing when students were acting unsafely” while looking at her phone, according to the decision.

The district later suspended her for one day without pay before the regulator imposed its own measures.

The regulator found she failed to treat the student she had dragged with respect, and it found her lack of supervision could have put students at risk of harm, adding that she’d been previously warned about phone use.

She was ordered to take a specialized college teaching course and complete it by September 2026.