Suffer The Children, in Vain

[She was] "happy, cheerful, eager to socialize with other children."
"She is becoming comfortable with printing her first name independently."
"If someone knows about the curriculum, they would know she's not mastering it."
Kindergarten teacher Odette Revoredo

"Your duty to report was not triggered because you did not have a suspicion?"
Toronto District School Board lawyer Wendy Lopez

Peter J. Thompson/National Post     Kindergarten teacher Odette Revoredo leaves 900 Bay Street after testifying in the Jeffrey Baldwin case in Toronto, Monday September 30, 2013. Revoredo taught Jeffrey Baldwin's older sister. 

 

Jurors on the Ontario coroner's hearing on the death of Jeffrey Baldwin, a five-year-old child who died of progressive health failures due to ongoing starvation playing havoc with his tiny, weightless body, are being treated to some questioning by lawyers like Susan Fraser representing the provincial advocate for children and youth about Jeffrey's older sister, who at six years of age managed to survive the dreadful survival conditions they were exposed to by their maternal grandparents.

Pediatric nutritionist Dr. Stanley Zlotkin had already given testimony that because Jeffrey's older sister was allowed by her grandparents to attend school where children were given snacks, that it was the snacks that had managed to give the little girl a thin edge on survival denied her younger brother. Both children were loathed by grandparents whose criminal record recording child abuse should have been an alert that the court was mistaken in granting them custody of the two children.

And both children were treated to degrading, painful, miserable living conditions, bearing no resemblance whatever to how loving parents, grandparents or guardians might go about raising children, inflicting upon them instead dreadful deprivation and humiliation, ignoring their basic survival needs and failing utterly to socialize the children, treating them as outcasts, which they became within the bosom of a family whose living arrangements included other adults and children.

In the kindergarten class that the little girl attended, an educational assistant recalled the child as a "nice little girl who want to eat many snacks and followed me wherever I go", witness Helen Voikos said. The child, she explained, stank of urine which was the reason that other children avoided her presence. She had, she explained, discussed the matter with the class teacher, Ms. Revoredo, who failed to respond.

And because the kindergarten teacher did nothing to report any possible suspicions of child neglect at best, abuse as a worse-case suspicion, the assistant thought there was nothing else she could or should do. The teacher noticed, she said, how "very interested" the little girl was in food, anxiously gobbling up the snacks presented to her. Other children, she observed, also occasionally asked for seconds and thirds, not only this deprived child.

She was aware of "a distinct odour" emanating from the child which she attributed to "toileting issues", and knew as well that the little girl had missed a troubling number of school days, but felt the child "was away with a reason", and simply dismissed the issue, or even the combination of peculiarly troubling issues as not worth dwelling on. Let alone reporting to school or outside authorities.

Yes, there were some notable issues with "fine motor skills", where the child had to be assisted to hold a pencil. Coroner's counsel Jill Witkin pursued a course of questioning meant to draw out what the teacher knew and how she interpreted what she observed and became aware of. She had studied the teacher's notes on the report relating to the second-degree murder charge in Jeffrey's death and the forcible confinement of the boy and his little sister.

"It makes no mention of her academic and developmental challenges?" she asked the witness. "That's correct", responded the kindergarten teacher. And nor did her notes state anything controversial relating for example, to evidence of a forever-hungry child, reeking of urine, often absent from school. Ms. Revoredo simply stated under questioning that she had no reasonable grounds to suspect abuse or neglect.

And therefore it had never occurred to her that she had a duty and a responsibility as an intelligent human being to have some compassion for a clearly needy child requiring rescue from an intolerable situation that would kill her brother and almost dispatch her from life as well. Because she noticed nothing worth reporting. No grounds within reason to report suspected abuse or neglect.