Learning trail: school principal accused of beating a child with disabilities
The Investigative Committee for the Irkutsk region has completed its investigation and submitted to the court a criminal case against the director of a rural school, Yevgeny Kashcheev, Izvestia found out. He is accused of abuse of office — beating a student. The teacher denies the guilt, calling what is happening a slander — according to him, the student's mother slandered him, as he had previously helped the guardianship authorities temporarily remove her children. Teachers describe the child's behavior as "undesirable," claiming that since elementary school he has "behaved badly," clashed with peers and offended them. Izvestia found out what happened at the village school.
What happened in the Half
Evgeny Kashcheev is the director of a school in the small village of Polovinka in the Irkutsk region with four hundred residents. In mid-September 2025, one of the teachers brought ninth-grader Mikhail (name changed. — Ed.) — the teenager hit the schoolgirl several times, it is said in the complaint of Evgeny Kashcheev (Izvestia has it), which he filed during the investigation of the criminal case. According to eyewitnesses, this happened regularly.
"The whole team asked to deal with Mikhail, as he terrorized the girls and did not respond to the teachers' comments," a resident of Polovinka, familiar with the situation at the rural school, told Izvestia.
The principal talked to the student one-on-one. It is not known for certain what exactly happened in his office. In the petition for termination of the criminal case for the absence of a crime event (Izvestia has it) It is said that Kashcheev tried to convince the teenager that girls should not be beaten, and adults should be respected. Realizing that Mikhail was not listening to his words, the director ended the conversation and released the boy. The complaint also says that during the conversation, the student used obscene language and dropped the monitor.
"He jumped out into the hallway and ran into the foyer, shouting threats that I would not sleep anymore and that he would come and stab me at night,— wrote Evgeny Kashcheev. "Three people witnessed the whole incident."
Another source familiar with the case materials told Izvestia the victim's version: allegedly, the director hit him twice, and the third time the victim himself hit his head on the table. However, the examination revealed only one injury on the student's body.
Evgeny Kashcheev claims that other teachers saw the teenager after their conversation, as well as the next day, but there were no signs of beatings on him. The application for the director was written only the next day after the end of classes, and a medical examination was conducted at the same time.
"On Monday, September 22, I saw Mikhail coming out of the school cafeteria. He had a large blue-green bruise on the left side of his face. Why this bruise did not appear on Thursday or Friday, no one can and does not want to explain. It is clear that someone hit him before the examination," the director wrote in the complaint.
Kashcheev assures us that there is no direct evidence of his guilt, only the words of a student.
But the victim's mother, Elena, told Izvestia that it was Evgeny Kashcheev who beat her son.
"My child was beaten by the school principal," she said.
She declined to comment on other details of the case, as well as the allegations of the school principal regarding her son's behavior, citing her busy schedule.
"He and his friend are walking around the school with a knife and a traumatic pistol," says the head of the school. — Even the prosecutor's office and the police can't do anything about it. It turns out that the teacher is all to blame. And a child can do anything. He won't get anything for it. And we have no leverage over him.
The director also said that they were trying to transfer this teenager to a specialized school due to his health problems. However, it was not possible to do this. In his opinion, an ordinary school cannot cope with such a student.
Since the second grade, Mikhail, by the decision of the psychological, medical and pedagogical commission, studied according to an adapted program for children with disabilities, according to the student's profile issued by the school (Izvestia has the document). It also claims that since elementary school he had been characterized by "undesirable behavior" — "insulting his classmates, disrupting lessons, <...> poking at classmates with pens, pencils, rulers," constantly "in conflict with peers, insulted them."
The editorial source explained that there are only two specialized institutions in the region, but they are intended for juvenile offenders. The circumstances do not allow Mikhail to be identified in any of them.
Izvestia sent a request to the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Education of the Irkutsk region with a request to comment on the situation, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Disclaimer version
The director believes that he was slandered by the student's mother, because earlier, as deputy head of the Bayandaevsky district and deputy chairman of the district commission for minors, he helped the guardianship authorities temporarily remove her children.
— They tried to deprive me of my parental rights, but it didn't work out. But the children were taken away and placed in [another] family at the time when the mother was drinking," Kashcheev added.
The family has been registered as being in a socially dangerous situation since March 2022, according to documents available to Izvestia. At some point, by a decision of the juvenile Affairs commission, two children were removed from the family and transferred to a foster home. But then they were returned, and the mother and son were sent to a rehabilitation center in the city of Ust-Ilimsk. From there, they "returned without completing rehabilitation measures," according to the pedagogical description of Mikhail. After that, the mother stopped abusing alcohol, and on March 10, 2026, the family was removed from the preventive register, the document says.
Now the victim's mother is not limited in parental rights and is not deprived of them, the Ministry of Social Development, Guardianship and Guardianship of the Irkutsk region confirmed to Izvestia. According to them, she is employed, and the children live with her.
"The family is currently not registered in the Irkutsk Region data bank for families and minors in a socially dangerous situation," the department added.
The position of the investigation
The investigation has been completed, and the materials have been sent to the court with the approved indictment for consideration on the merits, the investigator of the Investigative Committee for the Irkutsk region, who led the case, told Izvestia.
— The criminal case on charges of abuse of office has been fully investigated, all necessary investigative and procedural actions, and forensic medical examinations have been carried out. The final assessment of the accused's actions will be given by the court," she said.
During the investigation, the director's version of the slip was also checked.
— There are no grounds to believe that the testimony of the victim, eyewitnesses of the crime were given for the purpose of slander, has not been established. The version of the slip is refuted by the totality of the collected evidence," the investigator emphasized.
She also explained that Evgeny Kashcheev was not suspended from work, since the reasons for such a measure were not established during the investigation.
An internal investigation was conducted into the incident, Afanasy Dmitrov, chairman of the Commission for Juvenile Affairs and Protection of their rights of the Bayandaevsky district municipality, told Izvestia.
"We haven't reached an unequivocal conclusion, as everything happened behind closed doors," he said. — We wrote that at least there is no direct evidence of a crime.
The defense team emphasizes that the victim's testimony differs from the results of the medical examination: the student speaks of three injuries, but only one is documented. There are also questions about the fact that Mikhail denies beating the students, although there are witnesses.
In addition, the defense provided a witness who confirmed the version of the slip.
"[The Victim] He said that he intended to create problems for the director by telling him that he had hit him on the head with his hand. <...> His mother is going to falsely accuse the school principal and report to the police that he hit him in his office. She and her mother also plan to record the beatings in the hospital," the petition for the termination of the criminal case says in the absence of a crime event.
What threatens the director
The maximum possible term under the article on abuse of office is ten years in prison. However, a more likely punishment is up to five years in prison, lawyers told Izvestia.
— I assume that they will give a suspended sentence with a ban on teaching, — a lawyer familiar with the circumstances of the case told Izvestia.
A lot will depend on what is said in the examinations of the case, for example, when the teenager was injured — on the day when the conversation took place in the principal's office, or later. The prescription of injuries is determined by doctors quite clearly, Vladimir Sobolev, a lawyer at the Moscow Regional Bar Association, told Izvestia.
— Beatings can be recorded in a day. If the stroke is right before fixation, then it can be understood that it is not several more hours away," he stressed.
It is possible that the accused will be awarded only a fine or compulsory labor, said Andrei Nekrasov, lawyer and managing partner of the Nekrasov, Rudomanov and Partners collegium. The expert admits that Evgeny Kashcheev may be found innocent if the court agrees with the absence of a crime event.
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