Brenda Davis and her 16-year-old son used to pick wildflowers together. Now she picks flowers alone every morning to place on her son's grave.
Landyn Ferris, who suffered from a form of epilepsy called Dravet syndrome, died May 14 after being found alone and unresponsive in the school's sensory room, Davis said.
She is working to find out why this happened but urged all parents to “hold on to their children”.
“I am heartbroken,” she wrote in a statement read out at a news conference Tuesday by the vice-president of the Ontario Autism Coalition. “My son is gone. His laughter is only a memory. His light was extinguished too soon. I will always be devastated.”
Davis said she received a text message from Trenton High School that day saying there was an emergency. She tried to call back but the call didn't go through, so she rushed to the school.
“Minutes later, I walked into the classroom and found my son on a stretcher, receiving CPR, his hands hanging by his sides, his fingers turning blue,” Davis wrote in the statement. “That's when it hit me. This was not a seizure intervention. This was resuscitation.”
The mother of a 16-year-old special needs teenager who died at his eastern Ontario high school last month says she is heartbroken by her son's death and wants everyone to hold their children close. Landyn Ferris, right, poses with his mother, Brenda Davis, in an undated family publicity photo.
The Canadian Press/HO-Ferris family
Ferris was rushed to the hospital but was pronounced dead.
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“I don’t know how long he was gone before someone found him alone in that room, looking so cold,” she wrote.
“The last time I saw my son's beautiful smile was when I dropped him off at school at 10:30 that morning. My last memory of Landyn was of him lying in his coffin surrounded by his favorite toys.”
A family representative said Ferris was at risk for seizures while sleeping, and Davis had previously expressed concerns to the school about the teen's napping and asked that he be properly supervised.
The Hastings and Prince Edward District School Board said it had launched an internal review to determine “how this tragedy occurred and assess what systemic changes are needed to provide greater safety for our students.”
“We are committed to preventing this from happening again by implementing any necessary changes,” the board wrote in a statement.
Education Minister Stephen Lecce said he encouraged school boards to make the findings public, but he could not order them to do so.
“I think parents and staff need to have confidence that their children are safe at school, so transparency is vital,” he said.
The coroner is also conducting an inquest into the death, and Lecce said he urged people to wait until that investigation is complete before making assumptions about what may have happened.
“We really don’t know anything at this point,” he said. “So I want to avoid making assumptions reflexively or, as I’ve observed, some members of the opposition trying to politicize this issue.”
NDP education critic Chandra Pasma said schools desperately need more special education funding, including more education assistants.
She said: “We don’t need to wait for the outcome of the investigation to ensure this doesn’t happen again and that other parents don’t receive the same news that Brenda did.”
“Parents of children with special needs, including the Ontario Autism Alliance, have been warning for years that if we do not take action to increase resources for special education, it is only a matter of when, not if, children in Ontario’s schools will be seriously harmed.”
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