Miami Daycare Injury Lawyer

In Miami-Dade County

Daycare Injury claims in Miami

Child care facilities in Florida are licensed and inspected, and those inspection reports, including violations for supervision ratios, background screening failures and safety hazards, are public. In a Miami-Dade daycare injury they are frequently the strongest evidence available, because they establish that the operator knew about a deficiency well before the incident. Alongside the facility, an individual employee, a transport provider or the property owner may be liable. Any settlement on a child's behalf above the statutory threshold requires court approval.

The state was already watching, and the file is public

A licensed child care facility in Florida runs under chapter 402. Fla. Stat. § 402.305 sets the licensing standards, Fla. Stat. § 402.3055 sets the background screening every member of staff has to clear, and Fla. Stat. § 402.311 requires inspections. Miami-Dade licenses through its own county agency rather than through the state department, which changes where the records live but not that they exist.

That is the reason these cases are different from an ordinary injury claim. Before your child was hurt, somebody was already writing down what this facility got wrong, on a schedule, and filing it where anybody can read it. A violation for supervision, for screening or for an unsafe condition, cited before the incident and cited again afterward, does more work than any witness.

The ratio is a number, not an opinion

Supervision is where most of these cases actually turn, and the standard is not a matter of judgment. Fla. Stat. § 402.305 sets a minimum of one member of staff for every four children under one year old, one for every six aged one to two, one for every eleven aged two to three, one for every fifteen aged three to four, one for every twenty aged four to five, and one for every twenty-five aged five and over.

So the question after an injury is a countable one: how many children were in that room, and how many adults. Sign-in sheets, staff schedules, payroll and the facility’s own daily records answer it, and they were created for other reasons, which is what makes them useful. A facility that was two staff short at ten in the morning does not get to describe what happened as unavoidable.

Who answers besides the facility

The center is the obvious defendant and frequently not the only one, or the one with the most insurance. An individual member of staff can be liable for what they did. The company that owns the building, where it is not the operator, answers for the condition of the premises. A transport company running the van answers for the van. The manufacturer or installer of playground equipment answers for what it built, and the surfacing under that equipment is a separate question again from the equipment itself.

Where a child was hurt by another child, the claim is still against the facility rather than the family, and it turns on supervision and on what the center already knew about a pattern of behavior it had recorded and not acted on.

A settlement for a child goes through the court

A claim belonging to a minor is not settled the way an adult’s is. Under Fla. Stat. § 744.387, a parent can settle a claim on a child’s behalf without a guardianship where the net amount is $15,000 or less, and above that the court requires a guardian of the property to be appointed. Where a lawsuit has already been filed, the court approves the settlement whatever its size.

None of that is an obstacle. It is a protection, and it exists because the money belongs to the child rather than to the household. It does mean the timetable at the end of a child’s case is longer than a parent expects, and it is worth knowing that at the start rather than in the last week.

Where your case would be handled

Our office is at 1111 Brickell Avenue, 11th Floor, Miami, FL 33131, and a claim arising here is filed in the Eleventh Judicial Circuit at the Miami-Dade County Courthouse.

The law that decides it

The statutes, deadlines and proof requirements for a premises liability claim are the same anywhere in Florida, so they live once on our florida premises liability lawyer page rather than being restated on every city page. What changes locally is the court, the evidence and who you are dealing with, which is what this page covers.