Father says local school didn’t change his autistic son’s diaper for hours in new complaint

DAYTON — More parents are speaking out after seeing a video showing a Dayton Public Schools employee staff member hitting a nonverbal child and causing him to fall.

>> ‘It just made me mad;’ Parents react after Dayton school staff member hit their nonverbal child

The new complaint we first told you about Tuesday on News Center 7 at 5 p.m. came from an incident that took place at Rosa Parks Early Learning Center two years ago. Franklin Whiting said the diaper-changing routine for his not yet toilet-trained 3-year-old son with autism was so startling to him, that he switched schools when he couldn’t get answered.

Whiting brought his son home from school one day. When the child’s mother went to change him, she noticed there was more than one diaper on him.

“There’s two Pampers on him. She says, ‘This is the second one.’ There was actually three Pampers on him,” he recalled.

The parents got to the first diaper which appeared to have not been changed for several hours.

“It was basically dropping of him because the second one was dropping off him, too,” he said. “It leaker through that, too.”

Whiting said he was told that a male aide was responsible for the diaper situation, but when he got a meeting with school administrators, he didn’t get any more answers.

>> District to meet with families at school where nonverbal child was hit by employee

He told News Center 7′s Mike Campbell that administrators told him they couldn’t give him more information and that they’d handle it internally. That wasn’t good enough for Whiting and he then made the decision to move his son to a different school within the district.

As News Center 7 previously reported, an employee at Rosa Parks Early Learning was caught on video hitting a nonverbal student and causing him to fall to the ground last month. Whiting said he doesn’t think anything like that should have happened but claimed to have warned school officials that something worse was going to happen two years ago.

“This is an ongoing thing that needs to stop and it goes all the way to the school board,” he said.

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