Parents place a lot of trust in the people who look after their children on a daily basis, even more so when a child has special needs. Although these carers may be complete strangers, they would be expected to properly look after the children in their care.
This is what one Mom, Melaina Whitley, expected from Friendship Pediatric Services Daycare Center for children with special needs, where she sends her son for speech therapy.
After unsuspectedly receiving a call from the Daycare informing her that Tanner needed to be picked up early because he was vomiting, she realized something was not right when her son mentioned the words “hot sauce”.
Whitley said: “When he said hot sauce, I thought maybe pop tarts, and I was like, ‘Hot sauce?’ Because I didn’t know he knew the word hot sauce, so I know she had to have told him, ‘I’m giving you hot sauce’”
Whitley decided to confront the teacher about the issue and also reported the incident to the police. She later found out that the teacher admitted to making kids drink hot sauce as a form of punishment.
Whitley said “I know when she was like, ‘Let me give you hot sauce,’ he didn’t just say, ‘Okay, cool,’ and open his mouth. It must have been forced because he wasn’t just like, ‘Here give me some hot sauce.’ He said he was crying and had to get water and it was nasty. I don’t know if this was the first time or he was the only child.”
This is certainly not the type of treatment any parent would expect from any daycare center, let alone one that looks after kids with special needs.
Rightly so, Whitley is demanding that the teacher is fired for her actions. She said
“You just don’t expect that. They’re supposed to be qualified to work with special needs children and they’re supposed know to not give hot sauce”