e-mail
Special needs children are often known to do what schools and others call “elope”, i.e. run away from school. Well, on March 29, a 14-year-old middle schooler in Baltimore “eloped” from his middle school and wasn’t found for ten days…til 3 am on Easter Sunday.
Neither of his parents were notified that he had run away from school until the father showed to pick him up later that day after school was out.
The boy, who has been diagnosed with emotional and attention deficit disorders, was spotted by a Good Samaritan at a Checkers restaurant. No one is sure where the boy spent the 10 nights he was missing.
Meanwhile, special education parents and advocates are left to wonder if any action will be taken against the school.
On February 26 (more than a month before this incident), the school agreed in an IEP meeting to assign an full-time one-on-one aide to this child. But after a month and three actual incidents of running away, no aide had yet been assigned.
James Williams, a special education advocate working with the family, placed the responsibility squarely on the administrators.
“The administration doesn’t have staff that understands what’s going on with kids like these,” Williams said. “They base their decisions on their own experience, not the professional’s experience. And until they do, special-needs kids like this won’t get the services they need.”
Special Ed Law Blogger, Charles Fox, points out that in his experience schools are rarely held responsible for such breaches of safety. Yet knowing that your child has problems with running/elopement issues, stories like this don’t inspire much trust in the school systems. In fact, just reading through Fox’s blog makes you realize that the Baltimore School System has more problems than just one child disappearing for ten days.
Yet, what happens if you’re the parent of the one child who does run away, the one child who does get hurt by another child at school, the one child injured during a restraint, the one child who is ignored, abused, overlooked or punished for their disability?
And worse yet…what if, because your child has a disability that prevents him from communicating to you about his school day, he isn’t able to tell you what’s really going on?
Yes, I think there are lots of dedicated special education teachers who try very hard to teach disabled children against overwhelming odds. One of those odds is a lack of understanding at the administrative level of what these kids need, and the lack of prioritizing that need so that it gets the funding and resources the kids deserve.
And then there’s that ego that gets in the way. I’m guessing that ego was at least in part to blame for why the school didn’t notify the parents when this child ran from the school. Because unless that’s it, there’s little explanation as to why a phone all to either parent was not placed…and as of yet, no explanation has been offered at all. Maybe the school thinks no explanation is necessary.
Absolutely unreal.