The mother of a severely disabled 12-year-old has filed a lawsuit against the Adams 12 Five Star School District after her son broke both legs when he lost control of his wheelchair on a ramp while unsupervised.
The lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Denver alleges the district violated the federal Americans with Disabilities Act by failing to provide accommodations for the boy’s disability “manifested deliberate indifference to the plaintiff’s safety and to his federally protected rights.”
The lawsuit alleges that the child continues to suffer mentally, physically, and emotionally, with feelings of humiliation, frustration, hopelessness, and isolation.
“This child already has immense challenges in his life and now has greater challenges and now is going to suffer the effects of these injuries for the rest of his life,” said Igor Raykin, an attorney representing Patricia Portillo Estrada and her son. “And there is a cost associated with that that the school should have to bear.”
The district said it hadn’t yet been served with the complaint.
“If we are served with a complaint, the district's practice is not to share information on pending or ongoing litigation,” it said in a statement.
Raykin said he’s taken many cases of schools not properly supervising children and said sometimes minor injuries take place.
“I was really shocked, however, by the severity of the injuries in this particular case.”
The boy, who is not named in the lawsuit, has intellectual and physical disabilities that impair his walking, standing, working, learning, reading, concentrating, and communicating.
He uses a wheelchair, walker, and a trike independently but requires supervision and assistance navigating ramps and uneven terrain, according to his Individualized Education Plan. An IEP is a legal document governed by federal law for children with disabilities. The plan states that staff was supposed to monitor the boy throughout the day “due to medical, mobility, and functional issues.”
“It was the fact that the staff member was not there to assist them that resulted in these catastrophic injuries,” Raykin said.
According to school security camera footage, on May 10, 2022, the boy tried to navigate a ramp between two classrooms at Rocky Mountain Elementary but slid and crashed into a wall at the bottom, seriously injuring himself. A school staff member discovered the boy at the bottom of the ramp but didn’t assist him, according to the lawsuit. The student gathered himself up and wheeled himself to class.
Multiple staff members, according to an internal school report, noticed that the boy, who had fractured legs, was “on the verge of tears throughout the day” but nobody tried to investigate what was wrong. No school staff reported the boy’s injury, according to the lawsuit.
The boy spent seven hours in severe pain before seeing his mother when she picked him up from the bus stop that afternoon, the lawsuit alleges.
The boy’s mother, Patricia Portillo Estrada, speaks Spanish and typically communicates with the school using Google Translate. She messaged the school but didn’t receive a reply.
“The school took no action to investigate the plaintiff’s incident, nor the cause of his injury,” the lawsuit states. “Without knowledge of the accident, and with no information from the school, Ms. Portillo Estrada had no way of knowing the severity of the plaintiff’s injury.”
When the boy arrived at the hospital two days later, he was diagnosed with bilateral fractures with severe swelling in his knees. He spent a month bedridden due to his injuries. Portillo Estrada had to quit her job to care for her son.
Before reviewing security camera footage, the school steadfastly denied any wrongdoing and the fact that an injury occurred at the school under staff supervision. It didn’t conduct an investigation into the incident until June 1 when Portillo Estrada and a translator met with the principal.
The lawsuit alleges that since October 2020, the district denied the boy “reasonable accommodations for his disabilities” failing to provide him “equal access to the benefits of an education.”
“I'm hoping that this lawsuit actually prompts not just Adams 12, but districts across the state to really take supervision of the most vulnerable kids more seriously,” said Raykin.
