A southwest Miami-Dade mom said she watched as her 6-year-old son walked off the school bus crying, with his arm swollen in pain.
Antoinette McPherson said her son Chrisanto, who is in kindergarten, was injured inside the cafeteria at Miami Heights Elementary School before dismissal, and she doesn’t understand how no one came to his aid or called to notify her.
Chrisanto is feeling better now, and wearing a cast covered in signatures over his arm. But when he came home from school last Thursday he was screaming in pain after fracturing his elbow, and his arm was bruised and swollen, his mother said.
The boy said he was playing with a friend at school when he slipped and fell in the cafeteria as he waited for his school bus to arrive.
McPherson said she has been in contact with school officials, but no one could tell her how her son got injured without anyone noticing.
“The most troubling part is to know that you send your child to school and he’s not getting the proper supervision of an adult, because if an adult was there with those kids in class, they wouldn’t be running around in the cafeteria,” she said. “There would be somebody to say ‘Sit down,’ OK?”
Miami-Dade County Public Schools spokesman John Schuster said that on the contrary there were 12 adults present.
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“School administrators have reported that the student was in the cafeteria, which is used as a staging area for the bus pickups at dismissal,” he said in a statement. “Conversations with the 12 adults present at the time indicated that no one witnessed any incident and that the child did not inform any of the adults present or the bus driver who took him home that he was injured.”
McPherson said she has hired a lawyer because she is displeased with the school’s response to the situation. She said she was only looking for the school to help pay the medical bills for her son’s fall.
