Mother’s horror as bullies at school give son, 8, back injury
IT’S the sort of phone call that every mother dreads.
When her son’s school rang, Megan Ward was told there had been an ‘accident’ – and that Noah, eight, had lost feeling in his legs and neck.
After arriving at the scene, Mrs Ward was confronted with the terrifying possibility that an attack by bullies had paralysed her son.
‘When I got there, he was just lying still while we were waiting for the ambulance,’ Mrs Ward said. ‘I feared he could be paralysed. He had been pushed off a raised mound by another boy.’
Paramedics put Noah in a neck brace and strapped him to a stretcher to take him to hospital.
The schoolboy and his family have been waiting for over two weeks for the swelling to go down, to find out how severely his spine has been injured.
Mrs Ward, 27, added: ‘Noah has been targeted by a group of boys for months now but this particular child has taken things too far.’
The gang of bullies at Westover Primary School have targeted Noah before, labelling him ‘fat’ and throwing food at him, his mother said. Noah was left so distressed by the comments that he refused to eat.
The boy who pushed him was suspended for just a day and a half. Mrs Ward, a mother of three, said: ‘Noah is still in a lot of pain. He has to take medication every three hours just to help relieve it. He was upset at missing out on things we had planned for halfterm. We had booked to go to a trampoline park and he was really excited about going.’
She added: ‘Noah gave a Valentine’s card and a little love heart note to his girlfriend asking to dance with her at the school disco but he never got to go. Instead he was at home in pain.’
Mrs Ward said she had been left with a ‘very difficult’ dilemma – whether to ‘let Noah return to Westover [where] the bullies still remain’ or move him to a another school ‘where he could potentially be miserable, not make new friends and ultimately end up with the biggest consequences of the bullies’ actions’.
She added that although her son had been picked on before, the school did not think it crossed the threshold of bullying. ‘This group have ganged up on him and attacked him in the playground,’ she said.
‘ He can’t even eat dinner in peace as they call him fat and throw food at him.
‘I spoke to the school about this just a day before Noah was hurt. They told us there needed to be one more incident before they would class it as bullying.
‘The boy who pushed him is in Noah’s class … he has already apologised for things he has done to Noah before but then goes and
‘He’s in a lot of pain’
does something else to him. At present Noah is wanting to return to Westover … we are stuck between two very difficult and rubbish choices.’
Mrs Ward wrote about the incident on Facebook, saying: ‘For the last few weeks Noah has been bullied horribly … beat up in the playground and worst of all violently pushed which resulted in an ambulance being called because he damaged his spine!’
A spokesman for Westover Primary said: ‘The school cannot comment on individual pupils but would stress that the safety of pupils is the school’s top priority and all appropriate procedures have been followed.’