By Delayna Earley
The Island News
The mother of a 7-year-old non-verbal autistic student at Shanklin Elementary School is left with more questions than answers after her daughter required a trip to the hospital due to an injury sustained on the first day of the school year.
On Wednesday, Aug. 6, Lenisha Manigo said that she received a phone call from the nurse at the school that her daughter, Jayla Frazier, attends asking her to come pick up her up from school because she had been injured.
Manigo said that she did not have any clue until she arrived at the school how badly injured her daughter was.
She said that she was told by the teacher and assistants in her daughter’s special education classroom that Jayla had injured herself by slamming her finger in a door.
“I walked into the office, and she was sitting there with nothing on her finger, blood on the floor and all over her clothes,” Manigo said.
Manigo said she immediately took her daughter from the school to the hospital where they kept her for eight hours before ultimately putting her daughter under anesthesia to repair the damage done to her middle finger on her right hand.
What would have been a bad situation for anyone was even more confusing and traumatic for an autistic, non-verbal child, according to Manigo.
Wanting answers about how this had happened, Manigo returned to the school the following day to allegedly try and meet with the school’s principal and student resource officer to find out how this happened and request that the officer file a police report on behalf of her daughter.
The school’s account of the incident remained the same, the injury was self-inflicted, and Jayla slammed her finger in the door when they were trying to change her.
Jayla has attended the special education program at Shanklin Elementary since she was in Pre-K, and according to Manigo, this is the worst injury she has sustained, but it is not the first injury that she got while at at school and allegedly every time something happens the answer she receives is the same, the injury is self-inflicted.
Manigo said that her daughter does not have a history of injuries at home or other places, just when she is at school.
“Every time she comes home hurt, they say it’s self-inflicted, but my daughter is non-verbal and cannot tell her side of the story,” Manigo said.
While seemingly willing to help get answers at first, Manigo said that the principal’s demeanor quickly turned cold as she continued to ask questions about how this could have happened to her daughter.
Eventually, after several days, the principal told her that she couldn’t respond to more questions regarding the situation as it had been referred to the Beaufort County School District’s legal team.
Candace Bruder, a spokesperson for the Beaufort County School District said that they are aware of the situation and parent’s concern but cannot comment on it.
“HIPAA prohibits the release of sensitive patient health information,” Bruder said in a text to The Island News on Tuesday, Aug. 12. “Although we cannot share information about a specific student due to federal privacy laws (e.g., FERPA and HIPAA), we can share that if any student is injured at school, staff protocol is to respond immediately, notifying parents as soon as possible.”
As for Jayla, she has not been cleared to go back to school by her doctors yet, but Manigo said that she is not sure what she is going to do once she is.
“I am terrified to send her back to the school, or anywhere else,” Manigo said.
She said that she is worried that Jayla’s injuries are the result of her not being properly monitored in the classroom and negligence led to her daughter’s injury.
Manigo said she is also concerned with the lack of care she felt like her daughter allegedly received following the incident and before she was picked up.
She feels that the response from staff does not rise to the appropriate level of concern considering the severity of the injury and argues that Beaufort County’s Emergency Servies (EMS) should have been contacted to look at her finger.
Delayna Earley, who joined The Island News in 2022, formerly worked as a photojournalist for The Island Packet/The Beaufort Gazette, as well as newspapers in Indiana and Virginia. She can be reached at delayna.theislandnews@gmail.com.
