St. Louis Daycare Hosted ‘Fight Club’ for Preschoolers

An appalling video obtained by Fox-2 News (KTVI) shows preschoolers being encouraged to beat on each other at a local daycare.

The video from December 2016 shows teachers at Adventure Learning Center, located at 5440 Gravois Avenue in St. Louis' Bevo Mill neighborhood, setting up small children to fight one another in a classroom.

The video was taken by a ten-year-old in a room adjacent to where the fights were happening. He saw that his little brother crying in the room next door and he captured the horrific scene on an iPad and sent it to his mother.

According to Fox-2, the children's mother called the director of the daycare and the fighting was stopped. Daycare cameras recorded more than 30 minutes of match-ups that had taken place between students that day, with the children punching each other’s heads into the floor as the teachers watched and seemed to cheer them on.

The daycare’s director fired both teachers and called the child abuse hotline, Fox-2 says. And though the St. Louis Circuit Attorney`s Office declined to prosecute, authorities did increase inspections of the daycare after the incident. Fox-2 News’ Chris Hayes reports that there have been eight inspections of the business by the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services since the incident, and they've documented “26 wide-ranging violations.”

And this isn’t the first time that Adventure Learning Center caught the attention of authorities. The daycare was included in a round-up of violations documented by the DHSS a couple of years ago. There, state workers found that the daycare left children unsupervised, one child was not properly restrained in a vehicle and, disturbingly, “children [were] not accounted for upon arrival from field trip.”

And these violations are far from the worst thing that can happen to your child at daycare. If you’re worried or curious about what, if any, violations have occurred at the childcare facility you use, Hayes suggests searching the Missouri DHSS website here.

UPDATE October 31, 2018: There is a new petition "calling on the St. Louis Police to file child abuse charges against the two preschool teachers." Read it (or sign it) here.

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