Who is Liable When Children are Injured in Day or After School Care?

If you are a working parent, day care, or child care, are necessities. Whether your child is in day care because he or she is too young for full time school, or whether your child is in after-school care, child care centers help parents get to work, allowing them to earn the living necessary to put a roof over their heads.

But we often don’t think much about the safety of these centers. They are charged with a very serious duty – not just keeping our kids busy, but keeping them safe. And yet, there are just all too many ways that kids can get injured in child care.

How Many Adult Supervisors?

It would be great if we could just say that a day care must have a certain number of adults, to watch over a given number of children. But that’s not really how it works, because of the different types of child care that there can be.

After school care at a school will have different requirements than a privately run day care facility, which will be different from what is required from, say, a religious organization like a church, that provides child care services.

But if your child is injured in day care you don’t have to worry about the legal “adult to child” ratio. While the law is important, a day care can act negligently, thus injuring a child, even if it is technically within the legally required adult to child ratio.

Poor Supervision

But simply having too few adults, for too many kids, is one way that child care centers or after school care centers can be liable for injuries to children.

On the surface, injuries to children that happen in day care are often just dismissed as “kids being kids.” Kids roughhouse, and can be careless, and can hurt themselves.

But that isn’t really true, when injuries happen in day care. That’s because there are adults there, presumably there with the obligation to watch over, and supervise, the children. Many child care centers are understaffed; they don’t have the adults needed to watch the children. Or, the adults there don’t have sufficient and proper training.

When a child falls out of a tree and injures himself, some adult should have seen, and stopped it from happening. When one child hits the other over the head with a toy, some adult in the facility should have seen, and stopped it, from happening. When a child is injured in or around a pool, or a roadway, some adult with the day care should have seen it, prevented it, or stopped that child from being in an environment of danger.

The Facilities

In other cases, the facility itself may be dangerous–it may have toys that are not age-appropriate, or playground equipment that is poorly maintained, or objects with sharp edges on it, all of which can injure the children in the facility’s care.

Was your child injured while in day care or after school care? Schedule a consultation with our Tampa personal injury lawyers at Barbas, Nunez, Sanders, Butler & Hovsepian today to discuss your child’s injury after an accident.

Source:

jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/348255