A Special Education Teacher in Utah Was Secretly Drinking Hard Seltzer in Class, Her Student Grabbed the Cup and Drank from It

Flor Perry was adopted from an orphanage in Ecuador when she was 7. Her mother, Kim Perry, first met her as a baby while volunteering at the orphanage and fell in love with her.

“She had a sweet personality back then.” Her father, Devin Perry, had been serving an LDS mission at the time. When Kim turned 25, he surprised her with a dedicated savings account he’d been building for the adoption. “He’s loved her as much as I have from the beginning,” Kim said.

Flor has 1p36 deletion syndrome. She knows about 20 hand signs. She can’t speak. She functions at the developmental level of a 2-year-old. Kim calls her “a ray of sunshine.” She wakes up every morning excited to go to school.

On March 18, 2026, her teacher at Vista Education Center in Farmington, Utah, was secretly drinking hard seltzer out of a tumbler during class. Flor grabbed the mug and drank from it. Nobody could determine how much she had. She fell and hit her head.

The district’s first call to the Perrys wasn’t about the alcohol. It was about the fall. Flor had hit her head at school. It took 3 days for them to be notified, on March 21. The hard seltzer detail only came out while the district was explaining why she fell. The district said they “didn’t have a witness report until several days later.”

Katherine Meatoga admitted to district officials that the hard seltzer was hers. She was arrested and charged with drinking alcohol on school grounds, a class B misdemeanor. She resigned before the district could finish its internal investigation. No blood-alcohol test results have been released. No details on the severity of Flor’s head injury or any medical treatment have been made public.

In 2022, at Northridge High School in Layton, also in the Davis School District, aides allegedly pulled Flor’s hair in retaliation for her pulling theirs, stepped on her arm to pin it down, and poked her with pencils. It only came to light when one aide stepped forward. 3 employees were placed on leave. Flor was transferred to Vista Education Center, the same school where the drinking incident happened.

When Devin Perry was told about this second incident, he said: “I feel disbelief. Here we go again.”

The Perrys say the classroom aides at Vista are good and that Flor loves going to school there. They want her to stay. The failure, they say, is the teacher and the district’s communication with parents.

“These are vulnerable, nonverbal students who can’t come home and say, ‘Hey, something weird happened at school today.’ We’re trusting that the district is taking care of them and being open with us about things that occur.”

Meatoga is due in court on May 5.