The student’s mum, Ledelldra Brooks, was horrified to turn up unexpectedly and discover her seven-year-old disabled daughter inside an enclosure created using a baby stair-gate and bookshelves. Her daughter was also wearing a dirty nappy upon her arrival.
Ledelldra then contacted the police to come down to the school where they took apart the enclosure and referred the incident to authorities as a “possible case of misdemeanour child abuse”.
The mum has said that the area the special education teacher kept her disabled daughter in “amounted to a cage” and has said she wishes to use this incident to raise awareness: “I honestly want the public to know what’s going on behind special education, what went on in my daughter’s class.”
Princpal of the school, Christie Yang has since said that the enclosure was installed three years ago “as a safety precaution” while the executive director of the State Council on Developmental Disabilities expressed his outrage: “This is not something I would put a child into and claim this is for their own protection. It’s a cage, this is what you would put a wild animal in. I can’t believe that somebody, an administrator walking into that room and seeing it, would allow that.”
