A Bristol Township boy hasn’t returned to school since being bloodied in a cafeteria incident last spring
Officials said Grayson Callahan was pushed into a table by an older child. The boy’s father says the district is withholding video.
Steve Callahan remembers hearing his son’s screams coming from the nurse’s office at Keystone Elementary School as staff members repeated the phrase: “It was an accident.”
Inside the office, Callahan found his kindergartner, Grayson, with a gash on his forehead and teeth hanging “flat forward” from his gums. He had a different shirt on; Callahan later noticed the shirt his son had worn to school was bloodied.
He asked the staff what had happened. “They said, ‘We don’t know, we have to watch the cameras,’” Callahan said. “I said, ‘So how do you know it was an accident?’”
That was May, and Callahan is still trying to confirm what happened. While officials told him later that day that Grayson was pushed into a cafeteria table by an older child with special needs whose one-on-one aide wasn’t paying attention, the Bristol Township School District has denied Callahan’s requests to view video footage of the incident, citing privacy concerns.
Rather than returning to Keystone Elementary, Grayson has started first grade at a cyber charter school.
“That district is not being transparent with parents,” Callahan said. He said that problems “could be completely avoided if special needs students got the care they deserve, instead of whatever they have available.”
A district spokesperson referred to a statement released at the time of the incident, when the district said Grayson “was injured when he was pushed in the cafeteria by a 4th-grade student from a special education program run by the Bucks County Intermediate Unit,” which uses space in Keystone Elementary for the program.
The district — which said it was “apologetic to the student and family, and wish the child a speedy recovery” — said the BCIU was investigating.
“The Bristol Township School District trusts that the BCIU will share any updates allowable by law after their investigation concludes and put in place measures and processes to ensure that this does not occur again,” the district said.
In a statement this week, the BCIU said that it “has taken appropriate actions” based on the outcomes of its investigation, though it did not share what those were.
“To protect the privacy and rights of our students and team members, the Bucks IU is unable to provide additional information,” said Robyn Gross, a spokesperson for the BCIU, who said it “remains committed to supporting all involved in this difficult situation.”
Access to video footage vs. privacy
David Langsam, a lawyer representing Callahan, said both the district and BCIU have been notified of a potential lawsuit.
“At some point, the issue is going to be litigated,” said Langsam. The video footage is key to an injury claim, he said, and officials should find a way to allow Grayson’s parents to see it.
Bristol Township spokesperson Kellie Francello said the footage “contains protected images of children who have a legal right to privacy and confidentiality in the school setting.”
Langsam — who said the BCIU also denied a request for the footage — said there are ways to address those privacy concerns. He noted other cases in which he and his clients have agreed to confidentiality terms to access video footage uploaded to a server, viewable only with a password. Artificial intelligence tools also could blur the faces of other children who appear in the video, he said.
“It’s a minutes-long process, not months,” Langsam said.
In addition to trying to “effect some type of meaningful change” in school procedures, Langsam noted that Callahan has also been seeking the video footage for medical purposes. When Grayson was taken to a hospital after the incident, doctors wanted to gauge how hard he had hit his head, Langsam said.
Callahan — who questioned why the school had not called an ambulance, instead of waiting for him to arrive — said Grayson did receive a head scan to check for injury. “The teeth got the worst of it,” he said.
But the family continues to deal with the psychological effects, Callahan said. Grayson is no longer comfortable in crowded spaces, Callahan said, and has trouble focusing.
The topic of school has resurrected memories of the incident. Visiting a different school building over the summer to meet administrators of his cyber charter, Callahan said, Grayson panicked.
“He thought I was lying to him — that I was going to leave him,” Callahan said. It was “a giant slap-in-the-face reminder of … what we’re actually dealing with.” He said that “our whole lives are different.”