A Bucks daycare employee took videos of a teacher sitting on a 3-year-old. The parents are suing for child abuse.
No criminal charges were brought in relations to the incident at the Jolly Toddlers Early Education Center in Southampton, Pa.
The parents of a 3-year-old boy sued a Bucks County daycare center after an employee showed them videos of a teacher sitting on the 30-pound child to restrain him as he cried.
Diana and John Castaldo allege in a lawsuit that their son was abused repeatedly by his teacher at the Jolly Toddlers Early Education Center in Southampton throughout December and January.
The complaint, filed last month in Bucks County Court, says the boy began displaying unusual behaviors around December, such as crying often and having trouble sleeping. The child’s teacher reached out to the parents in January, saying that the boy had been throwing toys and stuttering, according to the lawsuit.
Unbeknownst to the couple, an employee at the center had recorded two instances of the 3-year-old’s teacher sitting on the child while he was crying, the suit said, and shared them with the Bucks County Children and Youth Social Services Agency.
When the Castaldos went to Jolly Toddlers on Jan. 30 to meet with owner Nancy Thompson about the boy’s behavior, the employee pulled the couple aside and shared the videos with them.
“You feel kind of numb at first,” Diana Castaldo said about the moment she watched the videos. “It was absolutely devastating.”
The parents confronted Thompson, pulled their child from the center, and contacted the Upper Southampton Police Department, according to the complaint. The following day they took their son to the Newtown campus of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, where staff documented “scrapes” and “unexplained bruises” on the 3-year-old’s body.
Jolly Toddlers’ and Thompson’s attorneys declined to comment. The Inquirer was unable to contact the teacher based on publicly available information and no attorney is listed on the court docket.
In court filings, Jolly Toddlers’ and Thompson’s attorneys dispute the lawsuit on procedural grounds. They say that the complaint fails to show “evil motive” or “conduct that is reckless” and misrepresents “the disciplinary procedures of Jolly Toddlers.”
A police report, provided by the Castaldos’ attorney to The Inquirer, says one video shows the teacher “push [the child’s] head against a floor mat while he cried and possibly said ‘help.‘” The second video shows the teacher “pin [the child] down with her legs on a floor mat which was in the corner of the room away from the other children,” according to the report.
But police concluded that the videos did not show abuse.
“I reviewed the video clips and observe some attempts to restrain child by an adult staff member,” the Upper Southampton Township detective wrote. ” I did not see any point where the child was in actual distress just emotional about the encounter."
In interviews with detectives, Thompson stood by the teacher. She told investigators she supports the “legs over legs” technique to restrain a child during an outburst, “provided that it was justified under the circumstances,” the police report said. She produced 21 incident reports related to the child.
The teacher told police that she used her legs to keep the boy on his nap mat during an outburst, but that at no point was he unable to breathe due to the restraint, the report said.
The detective investigating the case concluded that the behavior “did not appear” to “rise to a criminal act.”
A spokesperson for the Bucks County District Attorney’s Office said the office was aware of the allegations and no criminal charges were filed.
A.J. Thomson, the Castaldos’ attorney, said he disagreed with law enforcement’s assessment of the situation.
“I can assure you that if somebody was sitting on a kid of people who investigated this, they would treat this as a crime,” Thomson said.
The Castaldos say they were never informed about the “legs over legs” restraint.
“Of course she did not tell anyone of her support for this, as no parent would pay thousands of dollars a year to a facility that practiced this kind of child abuse on 3-year-olds,” the complaint said of the director.
Through the police investigations, the Castaldos also learned that there were no cameras in the classrooms. If not for the employee’s recording of the incident, they could have never known, they said.
“We’re just thankful that the whistleblower caught it before it got more tragic,” John Castaldo said.