Imagine this scenario: One weekday, just like any other day, you get up and wake your middle-school child to get the day started. He’s got an attitude, of course, because his middle school education has given him the idea that he’s smarter than you. He gets himself dressed and fed. Barely tells you goodbye because he’s got to get his “cool” on before he gets on the bus. You have a vague memory of when he was a darling little boy who worshipped the ground you walked on. And you move on with your day, getting dressed and getting to work.

It seems like any other day, and at the end of it, you expect to return home with the hormone-filled boy, who will spend time eating dinner but may not say a word, and he’ll go off to his room where he spends most of time now that he’s a teenager. However, today will not be just like any other day. The phone rings at work, and it’s your child’s school. Your child is en route to the hospital via ambulance. And the rest of your life and his will never be the same again.

When you arrive at the hospital, you find out the details. Your son took a punch to the chest at school, and the hospital is struggling to revive him. There are tubes everywhere. There are defibrillators. He’s surrounded by doctors and nurses working urgently. And eventually, his heart starts beating again after he’s gone more than one hour without oxygen to his brain. Numbly, you hear what the doctors are saying to you, but none of it seems real. And when you see the Medivac helicopter take him to the local trauma center, you can barely breathe yourself.

Sounds like a mother’s worst nightmare, doesn’t it? We send our children to school every day and expect that at the very least they are safe. We know they might have difficulty learning. They might have some normal growing pains of making and losing friends and learning social rules. And we definitely know that they have an attitude that is fully cultivated by the friends with whom they hang out. But we always expect them to come home the way they left. Unfortunately, for one South Carolina mother, every mother’s worst nightmare became her reality.

In Beaufort in 2006, a 13-year-old boy named Matthew went to school one day. In the process of moving from his classroom to lunch, the also 13-year-old school bully with a long list of discipline difficulties with the school including an assault the previous week picked Matthew as his next victim. A popular game at Robert Smalls Middle School was known as the “open chest game.” Revived from an old gang game, kids would cross their arms across their chest and when they dropped their arms, they would get a punch to the “open chest.” Matthew told the bully he didn’t want to play – that he had asthma. And within seconds, it was too late and Matthew lay on the floor in the hallway of the middle school dying. And seconds after that, he was dead.

Matthew was later revived. (However, four years earlier, Francisco Belman, an eighth-grader at H.E. McCracken Middle School, also in Beaufort County, died after two other students hit him in the chest repeatedly in a school bathroom in 2002.) Matthew was considered lucky because he survived. He survived to live a life as a substantially mentally disabled young man with an equally substantial educational disability. He walks with a limp. His ability to use his hands is extremely limited. His vision returned, but somehow his brain is unable to process the input coming into his eyes. He will require supervision for his entire life.

The things that his mother was probably looking forward to may never happen. Watching her son’s excitement at getting his driver’s license. His first date. Marriage. Grandchildren. All of those things that a mother finds hope in when her baby has grown to be a sullen teen. Now, her hopes and dreams for him are shattered. Her life is filled with the job of caring for him full time. Her own life is changed as she cannot work, cannot run an errand without having someone to watch Matthew, is left with the full-time responsibility of caring for him until the end of her life or his.

J. Olin McDougall II, an attorney in Beaufort, mediated the case with the Beaufort County School District. According to the Beaufort Gazette and Island Packet, two local newspapers which reported the story, McDougall’s files contain more than 90 sheriff’s office reports documenting incidents of assault and battery at Robert Smalls Middle School between January 2001 and July 2006. Some of the reports document fights between students and others detail assaults on school employees.

Ninety sheriff’s office reports for assault and battery at a middle school in less than five years. Ninety sheriff’s office reports for assault and battery in approximately 900 days of school. An average of one report every 10 days. Once every two weeks, the sheriff’s department is entering a middle school and dealing with assault and battery. What kind of odds did Matthew have that fateful day? Was his mother even aware that sending her child to school could result in his death? Or that her “normal” child would be returned to her with substantial mental and physical disabilities?

Don’t we all put our children on the bus or drop them off at school and trust that they’ll return safe and secure? Aren’t our schools responsible for protecting our children as well as educating them?

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Categories: *Are All of Those Yours?! by Stephanie Trevitz, All Articles, Hot Topics, Need to know, Parents Panel
Tags: features