Jamisha Augustine said she filled out all the necessary forms, accompanied by notes from her daughter’s doctor, alerting school officials that her 6-year-old suffered from a milk allergy.
But earlier this week, Augustine’s daughter was given milk for breakfast at Rollins Place Elementary School in Zachary, Louisiana. She went to the bathroom multiple times before her teacher eventually stopped letting her go, with messy consequences, according to television station WSAZ-3.
“She asked her teacher to go to the restroom, but she said no because she went too many times,” said Augustine, who called the school’s actions “irresponsible, hazardous, disgraceful and really pathetic.”
Eventually the 6-year-old soiled herself and was forced to clean up the mess without any help.
“So, upon her going to the office after having an accident, the principal told her she was too big to be having accidents on herself,” Augustine said.
The principal told Augustine that her daughter needed to be disciplined for the accident.
“I said, what was the point of making her clean that up? Do y’all have janitors? She said they do have janitors, but she needed a form of discipline,” Augustine said. “I’m saying, how can you punish her for having an accident?”
Ben Necaise, the Superintendent of Zachary Community Schools, agreed with Augustine, saying the teacher and principal should’ve handled the situation more sensitively and have since been “retrained.”
“You learn from mistakes,” Necaise said. “You take ownership, accept them, and try to do what’s right by the child and parent. In hindsight, they realized that was not an appropriate step. We do have safety precautions that we have to abide by, and again, a child should never be put in that situation to have to deal with that.”
The school system called Augustine and offered a formal apology, but the mother said she’s waiting to see how such incidents are handled in the future.
“You [should] send a janitor in with the proper equipment,” Augustine said. “But a 6-year-old kid, you are going to make them clean up poop without gloves. It’s disgraceful and should not have gone on in our school. It should not have happened.”
