According to reports in the Southeast Texas Record, the latest in what seems to be quite a few instances of daycare centers being sued over leaving children unattended in vehicles has been settled.
The lawsuit was filed for $1 million over an incident in 2012 when a child was left in a daycare center van while the daycare worker who was supposed to be driving her to her school but the driver went home and went to sleep, forgetting about the child. The child was in the daycare center’s van for approximately two hours. She managed to get out by herself and crossed a highway before witnesses noticed the 4-year old and reported the incident.
The lawsuit was dismissed and the settlement was tentative at the time of reporting. The lawsuit alleged that the child was falsely imprisoned and that the daycare center was negligent for hiring the driver involved in the incident.
Drivers and Daycare Centers
Drivers are among the employees at daycare centers who don’t have the same level of responsibility for taking care of the children as the direct caregivers do, but how are oftentimes in positions to do a lot of harm if they’re not attentive to the duties that they do have. There are some things that parents may want to do to decrease the chances of having to deal with incompetent employees such as the one whose actions spurred the lawsuit detailed above.
Make sure that the daycare does background checks on all their employees, not just the regular staff. This includes drivers, janitors and other employees that sometimes have access to the children or who, in some cases, are responsible for various forms of care. The more a daycare center invests in vetting its employees, the safer it is to have your children at that facility.
For some forms of daycare abuse legal help might start with identifying exactly what type of negligence led to your child being placed in an unacceptably dangerous situation. It might be a driver’s negligence, the facility’s negligence in not properly attending to their employees and background checking them or other forms of negligence. This can be hard to define, but a good attorney will be able to figure out what went wrong, who was responsible and how much you should sue the daycare facility for in light of their negligent actions and the hardships your child was made to suffer.