Kara is my youngest daughter. I am starting this blog for her. She was born with a heart defect and had open heart surgery at age one. My biggest heartbreak is that a resident doctor read a wrong chart and shut her ventilator down, causing her lungs to explode and her liver and kidneys to shut down, as it was too soon after a 14 hour open heart surgery for her lungs to handle breathing on their own. She ended up on an eckmo machine and suffered a grade 4 brain hemmoragh. My beautiful little girl who used to walk and talk no longer could. I took her home with brain damage and suffering seizures at the age of four. I had stayed in the hospital 24/7 for all of that time. Missing my two other beautiful daughters.

Life has been a series of hospital stays, surgeries and procedures. I divorced and moved to Wisconsin for better physicians. I finally became brave enough to enroll Kara in a school setting and began leaving her for the brief times she would attend during the day. I was never far away however and every single day the first words out of my mouth would be “what are the plans?”. I always made it very clear that Kara would never be allowed to leave the school in a vehicle without my knowledge or being able to accompany her.

On September 17, 2010, Kara’s teacher decided she wanted to run to a garage sale and they did not want to wait on calling me and having me join them. This was not a school organized function and they did not notify me or obtain my consent.

When I picked Kara up that day, she was red in the face and very fussy. I asked her teacher if something had happened and was told that they had gone “on a short walk up from the school and that while pushing her in her wheelchair she (the teacher, Keri) hit a small bump in the sidewalk and caused kara to slide out of her wheelchair but that she landed “very gently down on her bottom”. I said that did not make any sense. Kara sits so far back in her wheelchair and if she hit something hard enough to come forward out of her chair, with a foot rest and not having the use of her legs, she would just go face forward. Keri assured me she slid out to the ground on her bottom. I took her home and ended up giving her a bath and some tylenol and put her in bed. She went into one severe seizure after another and by the time the ambulance got to us she was unresponsive. At the emergency room the doctor kept saying she was having concussion symptoms. I called her teacher the next morning and told her we were in the hospital and what the doctor was saying. Again she told me the same thing and insisted that Kara never went down hard or hit her head.

We did not go back to school until the end of March. Kara just could not seem to recover. She lost the use of the left side of her body for almost two weeks. She kept throwing up really hard and developing aspiration pneumonia. Not once in all of this time did I receive a call or a letter from the school district or the teacher asking how Kara was or if she would be coming back to school.

We did attempt a meeting at the end of March with everyone avoiding the subject of what had happened. Kara attended school twice after that for the remaining school year. Both times she began violently throwing up and ended up back in the hospital with aspiration pneumonia. That was when she was diagnosed with post concussive migraines. Keri, her teacher, still denied that anything happened.

After the second attempt to go back to school, I received a phone call from another student from Kara’s class. She periodically came to my house over the past two years and was becoming more comfortable with my family. She asked how Kara was doing and I told her not very well. I told her the doctor said she might not be able to go to school anymore because noise caused her to have headaches which made her throw up too back which got her lungs sick. Ashley (the student) said “well maybe when Keri made her fall out of her wheelchair onto her head at the garage sale it hurt her”. My heart almost stopped. I asked her if she remembered everything from that day and she said she could show me where it happened. We DROVE across town from the school and parked where Keri parked. She then showed me where they were walking up the street and told me how Amanda (another student) took off running and “keri was going very fast yelling for her to stop while pushing Kara and she hit this crack in the driveway/sidewalk and Kara fell out really hard onto her face when the wheelchair fell foward”. The crack she showed me was about 2 1/2 inches wide and over 2 inches deep. She said “Kara had a lot of water coming out of her eyes and a man she did not know came running up yelling at Keri”.

I called Keri immediately and asked her about all of this. She said Ashley was exaggerating. I asked her why she had told me they just took a short walk up from the school. She said the 18-21 year age group met at the building where the garage sale took place and that is what she had meant. I told her she knew she was never to put Kara into a vehicle without my consent and allowing me to accompany her and that is why she had covered up Kara’s injury.

I have found out that the state of Wisconsin has an immunity clause which protects the school from being sued, no matter that they caused such an injury my already compromised daughter can not hold her head up for any length of time and she has increased seizure activity and may need yet another surgery as a result to the injury to her head. Even though this was not a planned school outing and they did not have my written consent, they are immune to covering up the incident. Is this something that should be overlooked? Even for those of you who have “normal” functioning children, this should be a huge deal. Life is precious but can change in a blink of an eye. You never know if your child may suffer an injury and have your entire universe turned upside down. Do you turn a blind eye to the treatment of our disabled loved ones because they do not have their own voice? I have found out that Kara is not an isolated case of neglect or abuse in our school system. In the district she attended I have talked to several parents with similar (if not quite that severe) cases of covered neglect and abuse.

I intend to change the law that protects a municipality to hide behind an immunity clause. I intend to give Kara and any disabled child/person a voice and to show that THEY MATTER. I took this to a judge within the state of Wisconsin and was told that as Kara’s prognosis would never change that “SHE WOULD NOT BENEFIT THE STATE OF WISCONSIN”.

I intend the entire country be made aware.