A New York City public school teacher was arrested yesterday on charges of restraining two young students in their chairs and taping their mouths shut.

Police said Carrie Roberson, 57, was charged with endangering the welfare of a child after two boys – ages 9 and 10 – came forward with allegations that she taped them up in an effort to control them during class. Ms. Roberson, a third-grade general education teacher at P.S. 270, the Johann Dekalb School in Brooklyn, surrendered to officers in a Brooklyn precinct yesterday morning without a lawyer, police said.

The charges against her stem from an incident that took place in November 2005, when Ms. Roberson allegedly sealed the children’s mouths shut and taped their torsos to their chairs in an effort to restrain them after they were noisy and unruly, a source familiar with the investigation said. The incident came to light in mid-January, when the boys – who initially did not report the incident – told their parents, who in turn notified the school.

The source said the original accusation came from four individual students, although the Department of Education’s Office of Special Investigations substantiated two allegations of corporal punishment last month. Ms. Roberson, who was immediately reassigned following the initial allegations, now faces “appropriate disciplinary action” in light of the substantiated complaint, a spokesman for the Department of Education, Keith Kalb, said.

The mother of one of the boys, Helene Harrell, said her 10-year-old son, Johnathan Grant, detailed Ms. Roberson’s actions in a letter, in which he told his mother that the teacher had been yelling at the class, then taped him to his chair, and would not let him go to the bathroom.

Yesterday, Ms. Grant told The New York Sun that she considered Ms. Roberson’s actions reprehensible. “No matter what he did – and I know no kid is perfect, my son is not perfect – you cannot step over the line,” she said. “She needs to stop teaching kids.”

Ms. Grant, who said she met the teacher only once and described her as impatient and unable to control her students, said yesterday that school officials did not contact her throughout the entire discovery and investigative process. She said she thinks they knew about the incident and tried to mediate the situation without parental involvement. “Honestly, if I would have tied up my child and then he told the teacher, ‘My mommy ties me to the chair,’ they would call ACS on me,” she said.

As Ms. Roberson awaited arraignment yesterday, a spokesman for the United Federation of Teachers, Ron Davis, said the 23-year veteran teacher is eligible for legal counsel as a member of the teachers’ union, although she has not requested it yet.” Since this is a work-related matter, she will be provided with legal counsel” unless she waives that right, he said.

Ms. Roberson, a tenured teacher who started teaching at P.S. 270 in 2002 and before that worked at P.S. 108 for 11 years, has no history of requesting legal counsel from the union, Mr. Davis said.

Despite her arrest yesterday, Mr. Davis said he could not comment on the specifics of the current allegations, but he said the union does not tolerate corporal punishment and union members are advised not to engage in it. “If these charges of corporal punishment have been substantiated and she chooses not to fight them, she will have to accept whatever punishment the Department of Education chooses to give her,” he said.