‘Missing kid’ cases soar at city schools
City schools keep losing kids.
Complaints about unsupervised children who went missing from school buildings, buses and field trips or were left unattended surged to 457 last year — nearly twice the 279 cases reported in 2014, the office of the Special Commissioner of Investigation for city schools told The Post.
The “disturbing trend” has gotten worse since SCI chief Richard Condon warned Chancellor Carmen Fariña in May 2015 that lax supervision was putting kids in harm’s way. Condon’s report came after the drowning death of Avonte Oquendo, a 14year-old autistic student who ran out of his Queens school undetected in October 2013. His body washed up on a beach several months later.
The most alarming cases involve special-needs students and the city’s youngest charges, including 3and 4-year-olds in pre-kindergarten, which Mayor de Blasio has made it his mission to expand.
Among recent findings by SCI:
At PS 154 in Queens, teacher Stephen Morganlander and substitute paraprofessional Jennifer Vasquez failed in July 2015 to supervise a pre-K boy who ran out of his gym class, left the building and walked four blocks home.
The school had no cameras and the doors had no alarms, SCI discovered. Last November, the city Department of Education claimed it installed more than 21,000 door alarms in 1,200 school buildings to prevent children from wandering off, as required by “Avonte’s Law,” passed by the City Council.
Vasquez, a one-on-one special-ed aide assigned to the boy, told investigators she saw him run out of the gym but when she went looking for him he was nowhere in sight. Morgenlander said he ran up and down three blocks looking for the kid.
When the child got home, a construction worker in the apartment building let him inside to ring his doorbell and reach his mom.
At PS 251 in Brooklyn, teacher Pamela PollardMims and paraprofessional Nadya Lodvil lost two pre-K girls on a field trip to Brooklyn College to see a live performance of “Harold and the Purple Crayon.”
After the show, the girls got separated from the rest of the class. Lodvil told investigators she counted all 15 kids after the show, but while heading toward the buses she “lost sight” of some kids.
She finally spotted the missing girls with a college security officer. They had asked the “policeman” for help.
At PS 140 in The Bronx, pre-K teacher Lisa Bannerman in April 2015 released a boy to the wrong adult. She said a woman came to class at dismissal and identified herself as the grandmother of a student. Bannerman mistakenly gave her the wrong boy with a similarsounding name who “appeared to recognize” the woman.
The 70-year-old woman returned the boy to the school a while later, saying that “she did not realize” she had taken the wrong kid until she got home.
Unidentified staff at PS 241 in Brooklyn left a pre-K girl on the bus after it dropped off a class at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan in March 2015. When another kid noticed that a “buddy” was missing, a chaperone ran to the bus, but it had left. They finally reached the driver, who found the girl inside the parked bus. She was asleep under a coat when her classmates got off.
The DOE said each of the employees named in the SCI reports received letters of reprimand. Officials could not explain why PS 154 lacked cameras and door alarms.
“The safety and security of our students is our top priority, and we have procedures in place to ensure students are supervised appropriately,” said DOE spokeswoman Devora Kaye.