Katrease Stafford and Robert Allen

Detroit Free Press

DETROIT — A high school teacher fired after using a broom to break up a fight is getting back her job with retroactive pay, school district officials said Tuesday.

Tiffani Eaton, 30, was fired May 1, one day after the incident at Pershing High School here, where the vicious fight erupted between two ninth-graders.

The English teacher, hired Jan. 27, will have the option of returning to the school or another school in the district of her choosing, according to the Education Achievement Authority of Michigan, which runs Pershing High.

"We've been working diligently on trying to get her job back," Jeffrey Lance Abood of the Abood Law Firm, which has been working to get the original decision reversed, said Monday. "It would seem like it would be the only right thing to do."

Principal Gregory King had said in an e-mailed statement that the firing seemed illegal and "basic investigation procedures usually followed were not undertaken."

"I believe that the Pershing High teacher was illegally fired," King wrote. "She appeared by video to be physically intervening, risking injury to herself, to protect the safety of students, as school policies require of her."

She had told school officials that her walkie-talkie to call security personnel wouldn't work.

The present and former students at the school with an enrollment of about 850 had a mixed reaction to Eaton's firing, some saying she didn't have any better options but others saying she went too far by striking a student April 30 as the two male students punched each other out in a classroom, collapsing into desks and onto the floor.

In a video that WJBK-TV, Detroit posted online, one boy appears to be pummeling another in the head when Eaton steps in to break up the fight.

"Ms. Eaton should never have been fired," King wrote. "Period. ... Our teachers at Pershing High and at all other schools are called upon to do the impossible every day: counselor, security guard, teacher and more. They are asked to do so without adequate resources to guarantee even basic bodily safety."

He also said he has asked repeatedly for safety-committee meetings and for administrators to address insufficient security at the school, which is guarded at the entrance with metal detectors.

"I will continue to work within the EAA and with other state agencies to address important issues of public concern: why resources and grants that could help create safer schools are not being allocated to effectively address the problem, why teachers that try to do their best with so little are subject to illegal termination, or why the EAA is unable to provide meaningful security support."

The Education Achievement Authority is a statewide body, created in 2011, that takes over failing schools. It was responsible for the firing and reinstatement. Teachers in the schools governed by the authority do not belong to a union.

"Unfortunately, Ms. Eaton, the teachers, and the administrators at Pershing High have become skilled at making do without security tools," King wrote. "It has been a long time since the right security tools have been available, such as walkie-talkies for all security personnel and working video cameras."