María and Gonzalo are the parents of Julia, 9, and Tomás, 11, a minor who was blind in one eye at his school in Oleiros (A Coruña) at a time when there was supposedly no supervision by teachers. During recess, he was struck in the eye by a square thrown with force by a classmate while he was playing. The family fights to save their son’s organ and has a clear goal: “That something like this never happens again in an educational center.”
It was November 30 in Oleiros, at the Valle Inclán Elementary Early Childhood Education Center, of the Xunta, and it was raining. When it rains, students spend recess in the classroom, despite the fact that the center has a covered sports hall with stands.
Tomás, a sixth-grade student, played chess while other children killed their time, some of them “with a game of throwing things at each other”, until one of them threw a square with such force that it hit the left eye of Tomás, “it pierced his eyelid, the cornea, the iris, the crystalline lens and the retina, which detached,” his father, Gonzalo, explained to EFE.
“This would not have happened if there was an adult in class because they would have stopped the game. We just want them to accept that it was a mistake and at least an apology. Our goal is that something like this never happens again in an educational center,” adds his mother, Maria.
The school claimed that the rule of “one teacher for every 50 students” was met -each classroom has 25, so each teacher has to monitor two classrooms simultaneously, with at least one wall between them-, but the lawyer for the family, Pablo No Couto, maintains that this rule only applies to breaks in open spaces and in which all the students are in view of the teacher, “here the rule applies that students can never be left alone in the classroom”.
In fact, the school, as both explain, changed its own protocol the next day to ensure that minors were always under surveillance.
It was still December 1st and the family was beginning the biggest change in their lives, since the parents have been on leave to care for their son since then and the minor has undergone four operations, after which he needs a period of rest of up to three weeks in which you must maintain a head-down posture at all times.
“He has nightmares every day and even the other day he ended up screaming on the beach because sand got into his other eye,” says María.
At first, Gonzalo explains, “in a report they said that the square had slipped out of his hand and that all the protocols had been complied with,” but Tomás always denied that this had happened, especially due to the violence of the coup, and It was months later, when in an Education in Civic and Ethical Values ??class, another classmate pointed out the culprit and the center rectified it.
“It was necessary for another minor, in an act of courage, to point out what had happened for them to reopen the case. In the end they acknowledged it to us verbally: your son was right. But there are consequences and responsibilities that no one assumes, only us “he adds.
And it is that it was a very complicated course for Tomás, who could not return to class until June and was schooled at home, as for his parents, who when they saw that the first operation in A Coruña was not working, they turned to the Institute of Ocular Microsurgery ( IMO) of Barcelona, ??in which there were three surgeries with a high expense that they had to assume out of pocket.
What happens is that it is necessary to reposition the retina to prevent the eye from atrophying and having to remove it, although it does not see more than faint shadows through it.
The first two operations of this complex surgery -there are only two or three a year in this clinic- ended with the same result, so Tomás, desperate, did not want to undergo surgery, returned to Barcelona on July 4 and is now in the recovery phase. recovery in a new attempt to preserve the organ.
The family does not give up and their fight is so that no other family goes through this: “If the regulations had been complied with, the accident would not have occurred,” sums up their lawyer.
The management of the school has declined to give its version of what happened, while the Department of Education of the Xunta acknowledges to EFE that when this happened, the center was told “to immediately implement all the pertinent measures that guarantee one hundred percent of the surveillance of the students” and, in addition, they add that the educational inspection was in contact with the family, a last matter that Gonzalo and María acknowledge and appreciate.
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