The Day Our Daughter Got Hit

My Child

I drove over to the school, furious but attempting to focus on the calm I needed to project. In my truck I practiced aloud the precise ways I would ask my many, many questions of these fucking criminally inept motherfuckers. I just needed to find out what happened.

The school was nearly empty when my wife and I came for our daughter. As we waited to talk to someone official, the front desk ladies let slip that once they'd noticed our daughter's injuries, the bruises proceeded to deepen in color — clear evidence that it hadn't happened two hours earlier at home. They also said they hadn't given her any ice for her forehead, because the three schools under their charter shared just one nurse, who'd been off busy elsewhere. No matter what happened in the meeting, we decided, our daughter was not coming back here.

Our girl seemed fine though, despite looking like she'd lost a boxing match. She doesn't cry much, and doesn't traumatize easily. I'd seen her banged up before; she's very active, and very pale, and often bruises deeply. Like it was all a game, she giggled the name of the girl who had pushed her down. It happened outside, she said, and we believed her.

When three white ladies who didn't really introduce themselves finally walked us into the office, we mentioned the accused girl's name. "Her class didn't go outside today," one of them responded, before explaining that her teachers were all gone now, along with the principal, who was still at his doctor's appointment. The ladies wouldn't call her teachers for us after-hours – they acted like they didn't even have the phone numbers. My wife tried not to cry as they answered no questions, just suggested we call the school on Monday to set up a Tuesday appointment. Explaining why we were being investigated by police, who demanded we get our daughter to the hospital immediately could, apparently, wait five days.

After a quick check-up at the hospital, we returned home to endure four long, sleepless nights of fretting, debating, arguing and crying.

Being suddenly under investigation was hard for my wife to accept. As a teacher myself, I did not wonder why they'd called Child Protection rather than us. I'd been trained in the new Louisiana law, passed in post-Sandusky 2012, that designates all teachers (and bus drivers, coaches, professors and youth activity providers) as "mandatory reporters," obligated to report suspected child abuse or else face felony charges. On or off the clock, in the classroom, at Walmart or at the zoo, we are mandated to overreact.

And what heartless bastard would dare push back against such a law, designed to better protect children – the demographic most in need of protection in New Orleans, where corporal punishment thrives both in and out of schools? Some will tell you that all these young thugs need are father figures to whup their asses (when speaking to parents about their student's misbehavior, I have often been told, "You have my permission to whup him") but I believe New Orleans's impressive murder rate is surely tied directly to the city's tradition of parental violence.

Because we could not interrogate anyone at the school, my wife and I turned on each other late into those deep, dark weekend nights while our daughter slept. "I can't believe I let you send her there!" my wife hissed.

Alone in the dark, we finally took seriously the school's many earlier red flags:

"I should have taken her out," said my wife, "when all the pre-K teachers from the charter's other schools called me, but I never got a call from her actual teacher. It's been three months into the year and they haven't had a fucking welcoming event for parents!"

"We definitely should have taken her out after her teacher quit," I sobbed. The school had neither alerted us to this, nor introduced us to her new teacher.

"Why in the fucking world did we not pull her out after [our friend] picked her up from school for us — he just walked in and walked out with our child without anyone stopping and questioning him!"