The family had entrusted their four-year-old son to a licensed child-care center in Princeton. He was in the center’s care during the day, in a classroom staffed by an adult the family trusted to be gentle with a small child.
According to the family, a caregiver at the center physically mistreated the boy by pinching him, scratching him, and aggressively grabbing him. He came home with scratches on his neck. The family also states that the same caregiver made the boy use the bathroom with her and another child inside and the door closed for several minutes. That is the kind of closed-door isolation of a young child that a daycare’s supervision and boundary rules exist specifically to prevent.
The family says the mother was later able to view a video clip of these events recorded at the center. According to the family, despite what the footage showed, the daycare never reported the incident to the family through its own channels and never reported it to child-care licensing.
The center is a licensed Texas child-care center serving infants, toddlers, pre-kindergarten, and school-age children. Texas child-care rules prohibit improper discipline and rough handling of children, require staff to supervise and protect the children in their care, require appropriate boundaries and supervision around activities like bathroom use, and require centers to document and report incidents and injuries to parents and to licensing. The family contends the center failed on each of these.
We have demanded that the center preserve all video and electronic records, including the footage the mother viewed, before anything is lost. We are pursuing the center’s video, its incident and reporting records, the caregiver’s file, and its supervision and boundary policies. A parent should be able to trust that a daycare will treat their child gently and tell them the truth when something goes wrong. A center that has the incident on video has no excuse for staying silent.
We represent the family and have placed the center on formal notice of the claim, including under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and have demanded that it preserve its video footage and records. We are pursuing claims for the center’s negligence and its failure to provide the safe, properly supervised care it represented: the mistreatment of the child by its caregiver, the improper closed-door isolation, and the failure to report the incident to the family and to licensing. We are prepared to file suit if the matter is not resolved.
A daycare does not get to take a family’s money to keep their child safe, let a worker grab and scratch a four-year-old and shut him in a bathroom, and then say nothing while the footage sits on its own cameras. We intend to find out exactly what happened and to hold this center accountable.
We represent the family and have placed the center on formal notice of the claim, including under the Texas Deceptive Trade Practices Act, and have demanded that it preserve its video footage and records. We are pursuing claims for the center’s negligence and its failure to provide the safe, properly supervised care it represented: the mistreatment of the child by its caregiver, the improper closed-door isolation, and the failure to report the incident to the family and to licensing. We are prepared to file suit if the matter is not resolved.
A daycare does not get to take a family’s money to keep their child safe, let a worker grab and scratch a four-year-old and shut him in a bathroom, and then say nothing while the footage sits on its own cameras. We intend to find out exactly what happened and to hold this center accountable.
