Nurse sent 5-year-old back to class with broken arm

BRIDGEPORT — A 5-year-old girl who broke her arm in two places during recess at Tisdale School last Thursday was sent back to her classroom with nothing but an ice pack by the school nurse, the girl’s mother said.

Shawniqua Bookhart, the girl’s mother, said no one from the school called her about the accident or sent a note home. It was not until the kindergartener was picked up after school by her grandmother and the teacher told her there was an “incident” on the playground that anyone noticed that the child’s arm was “dangling.”

Bookhart, the girl’s grandmother, Portia Griffin, and the little girl with her arm in a sling, attended the city school board meeting on Monday demanding answers.

“I have a lot of concerns about the Bridgeport Public School district. I never got a call or a letter,” Bookhart told the board.

By the time she rushed back to the school on Thursday, Bookhart said the school nurse had left for the day and the principal was unaware of the situation.

Interim Schools Superintendent Fran Rabinowitz acknowledged that the parent should have been notified and an investigation into the incident is underway.

“There is protocol that should have been followed,” Sauda Baraka, a board member said.

“From the description I heard, protocol was not followed,” Rabinowitz said.

Elizabeth Petrocelli, the district’s nursing supervisor said that the school nurse determines when parents should be called on a case to case basis.

“Depending on the severity of an injury and state of the child, parents will be called,” she said. “In this situation, it happened 10 minutes before dismissal and the grandmother was told by the teacher when she picked her up in the classroom.”

The child, who has not be identified, was “bumped” on the arm according to the adult who was supervising the class.

“When the child was brought to the nurse from the classroom, the nurse asked the appropriate questions to the child and (teacher’s aide),” Petrocelli said in an email to Hearst Connecticut Media. “An assessment was done and after a few minutes ... the nurse asked the child if she wanted to return and she said ‘yes.’”

That’s not enough for the girl’s mother. Bookhart said she has since heard at least three versions of what happened: that her daughter collided with another student, collided and fell on gravel, and collided and fell down a small set of steps near the playground. She is unsure even when recess was and how long her daughter was nursing a broken arm under an ice pack in her classroom.

Normally the child attends the after school program until 5:30 p.m. By chance, she was picked up at 3 p.m. by her grandmother on Thursday.

School officials, she added, have all her contact information. An incident report, according to the mother, was in the process of being filled out by school officials when she returned to the school seeking answers last Friday.

“They all passed the ball to one another,” Griffin, the grandmother, said, adding she is fearful of sending the child back to school. "I am not letting this go."

At the hospital the child had to be sedated to get her arm reset, Griffin said, her voice breaking.

This is the second medical emergency at Tisdale to make the news this school year. In December, a medically fragile child passed away on the school bus on her way to school.

lclambeck@ctpost.com