They lied. Every time Brenda Robinson called to check on her grandson, 3-year-old Tavian Johnson on Sept. 11., the staff at the Smart Start Learning Center Day care in North Little Rock lied.
They told her he was fine.
“Are you sure he’s doing fine?” a twinge of something nudged Robinson to ask a second time in her second and last phone call on that fateful day.
“Yeah, don’t worry about it, Mrs. Robinson,” is the response she remembers after her noon-time call.
That was a flat out lie. The child never made it into the day care center that day. He remained strapped in his car seat in the day care van which had picked him up that morning. And there, just outside the door of the day care where workers told his grandmother he was “fine,” is where little Tavian Johnson stayed until someone discovered him and called 911 at 3:47 p.m.
At 4 p.m. Brenda and Clarence Robinson, her husband, received a call from the hospital. Tavian was definitely not “fine.”
Maybe after 18 months of daily reassuring the grandmother that everything was fine, the staff had become complacent. Maybe they just wanted to get her off the phone. Whatever the reason, the Robinsons never settled into complacency.
“You can’t be careless that way when you’re dealing with kids,” Clarence Robinson said in an interview with the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette the day after Tavian died, “kids can’t help themselves. You have to help them.”
The Robinsons both work, but they never quit caring about their grandchild. They did not just dump Tavian off. They called regularly to check on him.
Tavian reportedly looked forward to attending the day care where he learned his ABCs and did crafts. The family trusted the day care.
Their trust was betrayed every time they were blindly reassured that the child was fine even though not one day care worker had actually seen the child inside the facility that day. No one noticed that the child was not in line to receive his morning snack, was not at his table for lunch and did not pull out his mat for nap time. For some yet unexplained reason, the 3-year-old was left strapped in his car seat in a locked van with the windows rolled up. That is where he died on a bright September day. It may have been past the summer heat, but even when it is 72 degrees outside, the temperature inside a vehicle can reach 119 degrees Fahrenheit within an hour, according to Jan Null, a meteorologist for Gold Gate Weather Services consulting firm.
Similar incidents at other day care centers earlier this year prompted the state of Arkansas to implement a policy requiring day care staff to sign up children when they enter a van and to check their name off the list as they depart.
Start Smart officials told the state licensing officials they had already implemented check-lists. It was not enough.
A checklist is a great way to prove to state inspectors that each child is accounted for on a regular basis, but it is not enough.
Day care workers and anyone else transporting children need to visually check each seat to be sure it is empty as well as the space under the seats before shutting and locking the doors.
Don’t just depend on a list – take a look around. Children may be small, but they are not invisible. Establish the habit of looking to see if any lunches, clothes, toys or children stayed behind.
Plus, at regular intervals throughout the day, visually verify the presence of each child. If a child is supposed to be in a room or eating lunch with other children, be sure he is there or know the reason why he isn’t.
Children don’t need another care taker looking at another list with their name on it. They need someone looking at them. They need caretakers who can honestly answer a concerned parent or grandparent, “Your child is OK, I just saw him.”
Don’t just say “Everything is OK,” go, look and make sure everything is OK. It may take a few extra minutes, but it is worth it if it saves the life of another helpless child.
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times.)
Day care centers: really look at the kids
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