MEMPHIS, Tenn. - The state file on Kid University now ends the way these files end: the license is surrendered, the websites are down, and the building on Walnut Knoll Lane is closed for good.
The Tennessee Department of Human Services confirmed that Kid University, Inc., the licensed child care center in Cordova where 6-year-old Winter Jones died Thursday, August 13, 2026 after being left for hours on a hot bus, surrendered its license effective Friday, August 14, 2026, Action News 5 reported the night of Tuesday, August 18, with FOX13 and the Daily Memphian also carrying the closure. Owner Raven Marshall Lewis has taken down the center's website and social media accounts, along with the websites of her four other preschool operations, per Action News 5.
Winter Jones was non-verbal and autistic. She was supposed to be dropped off at Macon-Hall Elementary, a Memphis-Shelby County Schools school, and never arrived.
The closure lands on top of a record that was already public. The center had an October 21, 2025 complaint investigation that required corrective action. And after Winter's death, the Department of Human Services conducted a fatality-visit inspection that documented five transport violations: the vehicle lacked a required monitoring device, the kind of child-check alarm designed to force a driver to walk to the back of a vehicle before leaving it; the center could not produce documentation of the department's required transportation training; no vehicle inspection procedures were in place after the bus returned from its school run; the driver's transportation log was incompletely filled out; and no walk-through was conducted to verify every child had exited the bus.
Each of those five findings corresponds to a safeguard that exists because children have died this way before. Tennessee's transport rules for child care agencies are written to make it procedurally impossible to leave a child on a vehicle unnoticed: the log, the training, the alarm, the inspection, the walk-through. The report describes a route on which, per the state's findings, none of the five held.
Now a new allegation has surfaced with the closure. A mother, speaking anonymously to Action News 5, alleges a Kid University employee struck her 4-year-old autistic son in January 2024, leaving a handprint-shaped bruise and a black eye, an injury she says emergency room staff matched to an adult's handprint. She says she filed a police report and sued the daycare, and that the case resolved with a non-disclosure agreement she is now choosing to break, telling the station that if earlier incidents had brought accountability, "this little girl could still be at home having dinner with her family tonight." Her account is an allegation resolved by private settlement, not a criminal or licensing finding, and The 901 Report could not independently review the police report or the lawsuit.
No one has been charged with a crime in Winter Jones's death as of the coverage reviewed for this article, and no charging decision has been announced. Any person who may eventually be charged is presumed innocent. The Memphis Police Department and the Department of Children's Services have been investigating, and licensing violations are regulatory findings, not criminal charges.
Winter's uncle, Christopher Jones, told Action News 5 that someone "intentionally skipped very necessary steps to make sure every child was where they were supposed to be." That is the family's characterization; what the record shows is that the steps were required, and that the state's inspectors found they were not followed.
What the surrender changes is the state's leverage. A revocation proceeding tests a provider's record in public; a surrender ends the license without one.
Why It Matters for Memphis
The provider side of this story is finished: complaint history, documented violations, closure. The system side is not. A child died inside a licensing regime that had already flagged this provider, and the closure of one center answers none of the questions about how the regime verifies transport safeguards at the centers still open.
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