U.S. Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro on Tuesday said the director of a military day care center and several employees accused of disturbing allegations of child abuse and a cover-up have been fired and that the Navy is addressing the situation.
“I assure you that moving forward, we have learned the lessons from that case,” he said during a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing.
The comment came on the heels of a bombshell report by Military.com that accused the military of withholding information about abuses or complaints against staff at its child development centers and then prioritizing protecting the institution over the children harmed.
At the Ford Island Child Development Center near Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii, Katie and Jeremy Kuykendall, an intelligence officer in the Army, enrolled their youngest daughter Bella at the day care system.
They initially thought the 15-month-old was having a rough time with separation anxiety but then started noticing severe personality changes. The bubbly toddler went from being happy to hysterically crying or being quiet and withdrawn. She lost her appetite and wet herself.
Then came the bruises on her thighs, and as the couple would later learn from CCTV footage, her cheeks weren’t red from crying but from when a worker shoved a photograph of her parents into her face so hard that she had to turn a full 90 degrees as a second worker held her. More footage showed Bella was “pinched, shoved, smothered, and pushed up against a wall,” Military.com reported.
No police or command reports were filed on the day law enforcement responded to the first report of abuse. The day care also failed to document the injuries properly and tell the parents what happened other than to say their daughter had cried a lot.
The military did little to help, and it took more than a year for the three workers allegedly responsible for the abuse to be charged in civilian court. Even then, two were allowed to keep working for five months. One eventually quit and the other was fired, according to the news outlet.
Military.com interviewed more than a dozen families who had run into similar issues trying to get even basic information about what happened to their child in the military’s day care system. Not all were as severe as what happened with Bella but had the similar theme of the near impossibility of trying to get information on what transpired while the children were left.
“Even when they are told their children were harmed, getting accountability seems impossible,” the outlet wrote, noting that if the children had been in civilian day care centers, local laws would have required immediate notification and documentation of incidents. Because military day care facilities don’t have to play by those rules, parents are often left in the dark.
Of the dozen families interviewed, many parents said they were left with hefty legal bills trying to force the military branches to come clean with what happened to their child in their care.
The Pentagon has admitted to struggling with staffing problems, in part because of the low wages it offers. Day care workers don’t need any qualifications other than a high school degree.
During Tuesday’s budget hearing, Sen. Patty Murray (D-WA) pressed Del Toro on what the military was doing to prevent abuses in the future.
He assured her the issue was being handled and that the military was committed to “ensuring the highest levels of standards, of security, and care for our CDCs, throughout the entire department of the Navy and the Marine Corps.”
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She told him she would be watching and following developments closely.
“Men and women in uniform can only do their jobs if they know their kids are OK,” she added.