Articles

Parents claimed 5-year-old was told to walk home from campus

LAFAYETTE - A judge on Wednesday dismissed a lawsuit filed by parents of a 5-year-old S.J. Montgomery Elementary School student who alleged the child was told by his teacher that he would have to walk home after he missed his bus.

School officials denied that the teacher told Azarius Henderson to walk but did admit to a breach of responsibility for allowing the child to leave campus.

The trial on Wednesday was to determine if that lack of supervision caused enough harm to warrant monetary damages.

State Judge Durwood Conque said in his ruling that he could understand the parents' "outrage, their concern, their anger," but that he saw no evidence of any severe mental distress for the child or the parents.

"Obviously, it's OK to just let a child walk off campus," said Henderson's mother, Quanetta Henderson. "Had it been a parent (who did that), we would have been in jail."

An off-duty police officer spotted Azarius as he walked along a road near the school on April 11, 2003.

The officer drove Azarius to the First Years Early Childhood Development Center on Bertrand Drive, where the bus would normally have taken him.

The boy's mother and father both said their child alleged that his kindergarten teacher, Mary Wallace, told him he would have to walk to the daycare center because he had missed the bus.

That issue was not addressed in the court case because the school admitted to not properly supervising the child.

School Superintendent James Easton has said that an investigation by the school officials cleared the teacher but offered no answers as to how Azarius got off campus.

The lawsuit sought unspecified damages from the School Board and Wallace for mental distress.

Quanetta Henderson said her child became more of a discipline problem at school after the incident and had to attend therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder.

The teacher agreed that Azarius had become more of a discipline problem and a therapist testified that she believed he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, but Conque said the evidence was not solid enough to meet the legal standard for monetary damages.

The judge also pointed out the child was not crying and "was not in obvious distress" when his parents came to pick him up from the daycare center the day of the incident.

The family's attorney Clay Burgess, said he plans to appeal the dismissal.