Staff Reports
The mother of a Tallahassee elementary schooler is suing the local school board after a teacher slammed a “time out room” door on her special-needs son’s hand, breaking his finger, according to her complaint.
The case is being handled by an attorney for Morgan & Morgan, the statewide personal injury law firm founded by Orlando lawyer and entrepreneur John Morgan.
The suit, filed this week against the Leon County School Board, says the boy was forced into a time-out room in November 2015, even though school staff had been told “he would have a negative reaction to being shut into a room alone.” He has “special behavioral needs,” the complaint says.
When “a teacher attempted to force him in,” the child struggled to get out, and the teacher “slammed the child’s hand in the door, resulting in a laceration (usually meaning a deep cut) and fracture” of a finger, the suit says. The teacher was not named in the suit.
The family seeks more than $15,000 in damages. Takeaways has decided not to identify the mother or the student, whose names are disclosed in the complaint.
Chris Petley, school board spokesman, said the district does not comment on pending litigation.
Attorney James Biggart of Morgan & Morgan is representing the plaintiffs. He also represented a woman earlier this year in a suit against a Tallahassee Mexican restaurant after she fell off its donkey statue and broke her back.
She later dropped her lawsuit after the case went viral, sparking a Facebook page, “For the Donkey,” a turn on Morgan & Morgan’s “For the People” catchphrase.
(Ed. Note — This story originally appeared Saturday in “Takeaways from Tallahassee.”)
