BAKERSFIELD, Calif. (KERO) — It’s something no parent wants to see, your special-needs child coming home with bruises. That’s what happened to mother Jessica Lewis who is now demanding answers and joining a powerful movement calling for cameras inside special-needs classrooms.
“My daughter got him off the bus and when they walked in the house I hear her questioning him what happened to his face,” said mother Jessica Lewis.
Seeing bruises across her autistic 4-year-old son’s face, mother Jessica Lewis says she was shocked and felt blindsided as she says she received no explanation from her son’s school, part of the Panama Buena Vista School District.
Lewis says she had to call the school herself to try and get an answer, something that she says no one could give her.
“They don’t know what happened, they keep telling that they’re investigating but at the end of every conversation they’re trying to insinuate it’s an allergic reaction or bee sting,” said Lewis.
Lewis says she has a bigger concern, a lack of communication.
“Its not that I’m so focused on the injury, because had he fell off a bike and you called me and told me he fell off the bike. Ok, I got my answers we know what happened we know why,” said Lewis. “They didn’t protect him and they didn’t communicate.”
That’s when she turned to local mother Ashley Hopwood. We first told her story in May, as she started a petition to bring cameras inside special needs classrooms, something that Lewis now wants implemented in her own district.
“We may not get down to the bottom line of exactly how it happened but we can have a time frame so I really do feel as though having cameras in the classroom would help out a whole lot of situations,” said Lewis.
23ABC contacted the district for comment, they wrote back “We are actively investigating this matter. While we are unable to share the details of an ongoing investigation, we take all reports seriously.”
Lewis says shortly after the incident she moved her child out of that school and into a different one and she’s working to rebuild that love her son had for school once more.
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