My Kid Was Choked By A Classmate During Class During School

Hey everyone! I’m looking for advice on what to do in addition to what I’ve stated below.

All events happened at a charter school in the state of Florida in the US.

My son was on the receiving end of being double-hand choked around the neck by another student in class last week. My kid states, the other kid was full power choking, and my son at full power couldn’t get the other kids hands off his neck / stop him from being choked. My son said it wasn’t until other kids started screaming, ‘student A is choking student B’ that the other kid let go.

My wife was briefly made aware of the situation after calls were made to my wife and the other kids parents by the VP. Due to the timing of the incident, when it was reported to my wife, and us both being at work… I was only told by my wife that an incident occurred at school and we would talk about it later that night. Unfortunately, my wife and I never had a chance to fully discuss the incident that evening once I got home from work because everyone was asleep by the time I got home.

The next morning, I spoke to my son about the incident, and uncovered all the details that I’ve already described. Remember, my wife and I hadn’t yet spoken in detail, and she had only been told by the VP an incident occurred that would result in my son with silent lunch and the other kid with a ‘more severe punishment’. When my wife picked up my son from school at the end of the day, my son didn’t want to talk about it with her.

So, when I took my son to school for drop off as a tardy / late start that next morning, I checked him in, he was sent to class, and I immediately asked to see the VP. However, career day was happening day and it was already chaos for the school…, so the resource officer was sent out, told me to leave, the situation was already handled / why do I have and why would I have more questions?

After a long back-and-forth between the resource officer and myself, and clearly disagreeing on everything, I was told by him to leave and make an appointment to see someone because, ‘the focus is on career day, not what happened to your son yesterday’. I then told the front desk administrator to call my son back to the front office because we were leaving.

Once I got home, I reviewed the policies of the school, and how to make an official complaint. I then sent an email detailing everything I knew at that point, including what had happened at the school that morning to the school board.

The school board liaison immediately sent my complaint to the principal, which resulted in the principal calling me, so, the principal and I spoke about everything. She admittedly was not aware of the situation, and I told her that since my wife and I had not spoken, and I only had the information from a seven-year-old, she didn’t know anything about the situation, that we need to have a conference call later that evening between her, the VP, and my wife after my gets home and we’ve had time talk.

Once my wife got home, we spoke in great detail about everything we knew, what had happened, what happened that morning, what I had done in response so far, and that we had a conference call scheduled in a few hours…

After the conference call, the school agreed to speak with some of the kids, pull some camera footage, and have a sit down with us, including our son. We requested the sit down because the school has politely said my son is lying and is inaccurate in his version of events. The school acknowledges there was an incident, but it didn’t happen in the classroom, it happened in the cafeteria. They appear to be unaware of a secondary choking incident in the classroom between the two that happened on the same day??

As parents, we reached out to other parents in the class and asked if their children had mentioned anything about a situation that happened in class that day. Multiple parents spoke with their kids and corroborated our sons story without leading the children to the story. What I mean is, the other kids that witnessed it either told their parents in advance that something had happened, or told their parents something happened in class only after being asked.

The general theme of what happened is consistent with the other parents; however, some of the smaller details are inconsistent.

From here, there are details that get really specific, and I’m trying to give just enough context without oversharing for obvious reasons, so I’ll stop here, but might be willing to share more if what I’ve said so far does not paint a full enough picture to get the right answers.

I’m searching for what more we could be doing at this point.

If we decide to do something… what do we need to know? What can we do? What shouldn’t we do? Whatever we decide to do… we want to do it the right way.

If you made it this far, thank you for reading.