7-year-old stabbed on playground won’t return to school

The child’s father said the girl is recovering from a collapsed lung and will attend another school next year.

The father of the 7-year-old girl stabbed in the back on a Dayton Public Schools’ playground on Friday wants answers from the school that his daughter will never attend again.

Vernon Nored said his daughter is home recovering from a collapsed lung and that this ordeal has strengthened her plan to become a doctor.

Nored hired attorney Michael Wright to investigate the World of Wonder’s role in the attack.

“The school, for me, has not been involved. They haven’t called,” Nored said, adding that he knows his daughter’s teacher and the principal personally. “I don’t know if it’s school funding that you can’t have a gate around the school? They say they have people walking through that area all the time.”

The school has told the girl’s parents that she doesn’t have to return for the last few days of school. Nored said his daughter will attend a different school next year.

Nored said police said the unknown attacker asked the girl and her friends what their names were, pushed the girl down off the swing set and stabbed her in the back. He said he hadn’t seen the surveillance video, but was told the camera is a long distance from where the incident happened.

“The family contacted me to investigate the circumstances of their daughter being stabbed at school,” Wright said. “No one expects to send a child to school and for them to get stabbed.”

Wright said that if the school security officer called in sick that day, why didn’t the children have recess in the school gym instead. Wright also said maybe there are policy changes needed to prevent this from happening again.

Nored speculated that he initially thought perhaps gang initiation was a possibility or that a “crazy” was just walking through the playground. Nored said he was in Cincinnati when a family member called him to tell him what happened.

Nored said the school wanted to verify who he was when he called them from a phone number that had recently changed and that the school also didn’t call the girl’s mother.

Nored said it was horrible to see his usually fun-loving, outgoing daughter in a hospital bed. Wright said the girl may need some counseling.

“I want to go through the pain,” Nored said. “Let me go through it.”

The father said his daughter has always wanted to be a doctor and that “she wants to take care of kids now.”

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