NYC

School safety procedures are created to protect your child and the other children and faculty within the school. Just as a concerned parent child-proofs their home in order to keep young children away from dangers, so too does a school try and create boundaries to protect even older students.

One of the most important safety checkpoints in any school is the entry and exit areas. Most schools have door alarms and outside locking mechanisms and procedures in place to keep children from leaving school unattended, and to keep others from getting into the school without being granted proper access. These procedures are not full proof, however.

In a recently publicized story, a 12 year old girl took a 5 year old boy right out of school. The little boy was recognized on the street and immediately returned to school, but the incident has raised several security concerns.

Source:

A mother is demanding answers after her little boy was allowed to leave school undetected.
“He should not be left unattended at any given time,” Takiyah Beary said.
Beary still can’t understand how administrators at P.S. 202 let it happen. A 12-year-old student waltzed out of the East New York school with her 5-year-old son, Semaj, completely undetected on Tuesday.
Thankfully, Beary’s friend was nearby. She saw Semaj out on the street and returned him to school, where staffers had no idea he was gone.
Beary’s friend spotted little Semaj walking with the older girl around 2:20 in the afternoon. Where they were going? What they were doing? No one knows, but the school is just a block away from busy Linden Boulevard.
“I don’t want to imagine what could have happened. And it’s not just him. It could be anybody’s child,” Rachael Leggett said.

In another incident that in a Connecticut school last year, a 1st grader was sent to the office to meet his mother, who had come pick him up for a special event. His teacher told him to go and meet his mother, and being very young he assumed he should go home to meet her. He walked 2 busy blocks, alone, from school almost to home before he was found. In this particular instance, the boy had walked right past the front office and out the front door to go home.

All of the safety procedures in the world cannot take the place of a real sit-down discussion with your child about being safe, staying in school and never, ever leaving without a teacher or parent.

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