A cleaner claims staff told him to flush a fetus down the toilet after finding it in the bathroom of an independent Aboriginal school.
The cleaner, who did not want to be named, was working at Hymba Yumba Independent School (HYIS) in Springfield, southwest of Brisbane, on July 25, 2023.
The school, which has nearly 300 students from kindergarten through grade 12, receives about $9 million in funding from the state and federal governments annually.
The worker said she was waiting for a group of girls (who she believed were in grades 6-8) who were inside one of the bathrooms to come out so she could clean the area.
However, once the girls left, the cleaner made a gruesome discovery: an alleged fetus inside the toilet.
“I waited for them to come out… I went in there (and) at the bottom of the toilet there was a foetus,” she told NITV. Living black.
He immediately closed the cubicle and spoke to another cleaner, who later agreed that the discovery seemed to indicate that it was fetal tissue.
The couple went straight to see a staff member and reported the shocking find.
A cleaner says staff told her to flush a fetus down the toilet after finding it in the bathroom of an independent Aboriginal school.
The worker said she was waiting for a group of girls (believed to be in grades six to eight) who were inside one of the toilets to come out so she could clean the area (file image)
However, the staff member said the women’s suspicions were wrong and that the tissue in question was not human foetal tissue.
“She took pictures of it and (said) it wasn’t a fetus, but we were trying to tell her it was, because it had legs (and) hands, but she still turned around and told us it wasn’t,” the cleaner said.
She said she was “scared and traumatised” and told the staff member she would remove the foetus from the toilet so they could conduct an investigation.
“He gave us a toilet brush… he picked it up and just flushed it,” the cleaner said.
The cleaner’s aunt, local elder Theresa Tyson, was concerned for the student’s welfare and reported the incident to Queensland Police.
“I was thinking all the time about how this little girl was coping… She could have bled to death, or it could have been a normal thing for her to be sexually abused,” Tyson said.
The school said it reported the matter to police the same day and that officers responded to the school the following morning to investigate the incident.
HYIS says police have established that what was found was not a fetus “but a decidual cast,” which is when the lining of the uterus falls off in one piece.
Police confirmed to Living Black that officers did in fact visit the school two days after the incident instead of the following morning as the school reported.
“The Ipswich Child Protection Investigation Unit attended the school,” QPS said in a statement.
‘At the time, no children were identified as involved and no crime was detected.’
Local elderly Theresa Tyson (pictured), who is the cleaner’s aunt, was concerned for the boy’s welfare and reported the incident to the Queensland Police Service.
The police did not interview the cleaners when they visited the school.
The Queensland Child Protection Investigation Unit only contacted the cleaners for an interview this month, almost a year after the incident, only after the Living Black program questioned the handling of the investigation.
A former teacher at the school, who was there when the incident occurred, said the counseling nurse advised her to try to subtly find the student involved.
However, on the morning the Child Protection Unit visited the school, HYIS Executive Director Karla Brady ended staff investigations.
In an email to a colleague, Ms Brady said she wanted to speak to “some girls” to tell them that “the witch hunt needs to end”.
Ms Brady added that she wanted to “nip” the issue immediately so that “drama queens” do not make the incident bigger than it was.
HYIS strongly denies that what was found was human fetal tissue.
