I am not a teacher, but a day care assistant.

There were two incidents that pretty much shook me to my core. The day care center I work at specializes with children with disabilities.

One day in the summer of 2015, a girl who was about 7 came in and she kept touching the back of her head. I’ll call her ‘Abby’ but I’m protecting her identity. I asked her if something was wrong. She has dyslexia, so her speech is hard to interpret, but she formed her hands into fists and made a ‘boo-boo’ sound. I decided to ask the teacher in the room if I could take the little girl to the nurse. The teacher was curious, but allowed me to take her. Once in the nurse’s office, Abby touched the back of her head and the nurse moved her hair back to reveal a big black and blue bruise. We decided to call the emergency room to have the child looked at and probably take a cat-scan, because we feared she may have a fractured skull or worse. We then called CPS to inform them of Abby’s injury. When the CPS worker interviewed the child, she made the same motion with her hands and said ‘boo-boo’. I’m sure she was trying to say ‘boom-boom’. When asked who hit her, Abby struggled to say ‘ma’. The girl’s mother was interviewed and everyone was shocked when she admitted to hitting Abby in the back of the head with a spoon and kept hitting her because the little girl couldn’t read properly. Abby didn’t have a fractured skull, so she was released into the custody of her aunt, who like her, has dyslexia. The head of the day-care decided to ban Abby’s mother from entering the property. As of today, Abby is making some progress with her reading, but it’s still a struggle for her.

This one is the most recent and this one will probably stay with me forever. This pass January, another little girl (whom I’ll call ‘Katie’), age 5 came in and was crying. We thought it was separation anxiety as it usually happens among young children. Katie has an unspecified disability, but her parents said that she has a speech disability as she barely speaks. We knew something was not right with her, so we decided to stay close to her throughout the day. Katie kept saying words like ‘big man’ and ‘smelly’ and also ‘hurt’. This was the first time we heard Katie use such big words for a 5 year old. We asked her what did she mean, but she started crying. We approached the parents and asked if they knew something about a ‘big smelly man’. They said they had a New Year’s party at their house and they had a friend stay over who was down on his luck. Something clicked in us and we took Katie to the emergency room to be checked out. The nurse discovers big bite marks on Katie’s thigh and shoulders and CPS was called. The police became involved when the teeth marks matched to the friend’s teeth. The friend said that in a drunken haze, he went to the girl’s room, who was asleep and bit her on the thigh and again on the shoulders. He silenced her, but she screamed in pain, and that’s when he left the room. He admitted to having a fetish for biting. The parents had no idea it was him because their daughter was making no sense when she tried to talk about it the next day. We were all shocked by this man’s behavior, but the parents were enraged by what he did. The friend was arrested for assault on a minor. Katie had to get at least ten stitches on one shoulder and at least twenty on her thigh. The CPS and me and my colleagues were suspicious of the parents because they didn’t take Katie to the hospital for her injuries. It was decided by CPS to remove Katie from her parents’ custody and place her with a family member who lived one state over. The parents were very upset and they continue to fight for custody.