A Parent's Worst Daycare Nightmare – Video shows unsupervised 3 year Old child falling 8 feet from top of jungle gym.

HOW SAFE IS YOUR CHILD?

Thousands of children are injured in child care settings every year. Many times the injury is small and with first aid and a hug the child is up and playing again. Too often, however, the child requires treatment at a hospital and such is the case of little Melissa Byrd whose mother Christina says has suffered a traumatic brain injury after her daycare provider failed to make her safety on the playground a priority.

Christina Byrd and her husband Randy are like thousands of parents in America who must both work to provide for their families, and so rely on daycare facilities like “Bright Beginnings” in Myrtle Beach South Carolina to take care of their children while they are away from home. Unfortunately like those thousands of other families, Christina and Randy didn’t realize when they dropped Melissa off in the morning, that she would be the victim of neglect by the very people they trusted with her life.

WATCH THE VIDEO

Christina believes that Melissa’s near fatal drop from 8 feet atop the playground equipment could have been avoided had the “owner” of the facility, Mounia Belkasmi been actually watching the children whose safety she was responsible for.

Surveillance video from the daycare center shows 3 year old Melissa climbing to the top of the jungle-gym with a “teacher” looking on but not making any attempt to stop the child. As Melissa reaches the top her foot slips and she begins the long fall down hitting the equipment as she falls. By the time her mother arrives to pick her up she finds her lethargic, confused, moaning, and crying – an estimated 35 – 40 minutes minutes had passed with no call to 911 – Christina never received a phone call to let her know her 4 year old had fallen and when questioned by Melissa’s mother and hospital staff hours later, the owner of the facility did something that could have cost Melissa her life; She lied.

Christina could see immediately her little girl was in trouble. Her lips had open bloody wounds, and her body was bruised. Melissa was not able to verbalize what had happened to her and acted confused and did not recognize her own mother – Still the owner of the daycare insisted the child had only fallen a foot or so when she slid down a slide face first and hit the mulch at the bottom and did not think she was that injured – this statement caused problems in the emergency room too. Because the doctors were under the assumption the child had only fallen a foot or so, they ruled out concussion even though they acknowledged her wounds were not consistent with a fall that short. It was not until after the daycare owner released the video of the fall did the doctors order a CAT scan where they found a severe head trauma that explained Melissa’s symptoms of lethargy, memory loss, and vomiting.

The video clearly shows the child had fallen not a foot but nearly 8 feet, and that afterwards facility workers forced the child to clean herself up ..

Statistics collected by the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control indicate that more than 4.2 million nonfatal injuries were recorded for children ages one to four in any given year – The Packard Foundation has estimated that since 1996, childhood injuries have cost society $66 billion in productivity losses, $14 billion in lifetime medical spending, and $1 billion in other resource costs a year. Most of these costs associated with injuries are preventable by education, environment, product changes, and legislation. Lack of supervision is associated with nearly 40 percent of playground injuries. Falls from playground equipment are responsible for 20 percent of playground related deaths in the United States.

“She has post-concussive syndrome, Christina told Sun News, and it’s going to take months to a year for her brain to even be right and heal itself, and doctors still don’t know what long-term effects she’s going to have from this.” ~ Christina Byrd

Daycare owner Mounia Belkasmi declined our offer to be interviewed.

Christina and Randy Byrd have hired an attorney, and make it clear that they are holding Bright Beginnings owner Mounia Belkasmi responsible for Melissa’s injuries. An awareness campaign called #JusticeForMelissa was held this past Friday outside Bright Beginnings to alert the public of the dangers of child neglect inside the facility.  More events are planned in the future. 

If you would like to learn more about how you can support the Byrd family and the Justice For Melissa Campaign, please visit their FaceBook page: CLICK HERE

Two more rally days are planned this week, Today, Monday October 30th from 2:30 to 6:00 –  And again on Tuesday 7:00 am to 10:30 am and an afternoon event from 2:30 PM to 6:00 

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF CHILDCARE IN AMERICA

The first day cares were established during the Industrial Revolution, as increasing numbers of women in cities had to work. Jane Addams, the Progressive Era activist, was horrified to learn that all over Chicago, children were being left alone in tenement homes, morning till night. “The first three crippled children we encountered in the neighborhood had all been injured while their mothers were at work,” she wrote in her 1910 memoir, Twenty Years at Hull-House. “One had fallen out of a third-story window, another had been burned, and the third had a curved spine due to the fact that for three years he had been tied all day long to the leg of the kitchen table, only released at noon by his older brother who hastily ran in from a neighboring factory to share his lunch with him.”

Addams and other do-gooders created “day nurseries,” although in many cities they were little more than baby farms. Geraldine Youcha writes in Minding the Children that a survey from that era by Chicago authorities “found children unclean and crowded into one small room without any playthings, and several nurseries in which the ‘superintendent’ did not even know the last names and addresses of some of the children.”

The prevailing assumption at the time was that child care outside the home was deeply inferior to a mother’s care. At best, it was regarded as a useful tool to “Americanize” the children of recent immigrants. Even Addams believed the optimal solution was government subsidies that would allow single mothers to look after their own children. (“With all of the efforts made by modern society to nurture and educate the young, how stupid it is to permit the mothers of young children to spend themselves in the coarser work of the world!” she wrote.) Toward that end, progressive states created widows’ pensions, which were eventually expanded by the New Deal. Decades later, most people would know this kind of assistance simply as “welfare.”

Arguably the best child care system America has ever had emerged during World War II, when women stepped in to fill the jobs of absent soldiers. For the first time, women were employed outside the home in a manner that society approved of, or at least tolerated. But many of these women had nowhere to leave their small children. They resorted to desperate measures—locking kids in the car in the factory parking lot, with the windows cracked open and blankets stretched across the back seats. This created the only moment in American politics when child care was ever a national priority. In 1940, Congress passed the Lanham Act, which created a system of government-run centers that served more than 100,000 children from families of all incomes.

After the war, children’s advocates wanted to keep the centers open. But lawmakers saw them only as a wartime contingency—and if day care enabled women to keep their factory jobs, veterans would have a harder time finding work. The Lanham Act was allowed to lapse.

The federal government didn’t get back into the child care business until the 1960s, with the creation of Head Start, which was narrowly targeted to support low-income children. A broader bill, designed to help working mothers by providing care to all kids who needed it, passed Congress a few years later. But President Nixon vetoed the legislation, saying he didn’t want the government getting mixed up with “communal” child-rearing arrangements. Other than some increases in government funding for child tax credits and subsidies, federal child care policy has hardly changed in the last few decades.