My Son Went Missing… Oops! School Mistake!

This made me a bit upset. I walked my son to school yesterday, as normal, and dropped him off at about 8:30. Recently, I’ve been dropping him off about 100 metres from the school gate. You know, he wants to show his independence or whatever. Then I went home to work. At about ten past ten, while I was in a meeting with a student, I got a phone call from my wife. She said she had just received an SMS from the school telling her that my son was not there and that we had to contact the school to verify his whereabouts. Obviously, my wife was panicking, as was I, as I had dropped him at school in the morning in person.

I immediately tried ringing the school, but the phone just kept ringing. I was imagining all these terrible things, like somebody driving past and pulling my son into a car. Finally, somebody answered the phone and I told them that we got a message from the school stating that my son wasn’t there, but that I had dropped him there in the morning. So of course, the office lady treated it very seriously and raced off to check my son’s whereabouts. Luckily, she came back and said he’s fine and he’s happily studying in class. I asked her “What happened?”, and she just said, “Oh, sometimes the system makes a mistake. You know, the teachers have to mark the roll electronically now, and then that gets sent through to the main system, which compares the roll with the absentee list, and then for children who are unaccounted for, an SMS is sent out to their parents”. I thanked the lady for her time and told her that I was just happy that my son was safe.

This electronic roll-marking system is all well and good, except that I dropped my son off at 8:30, but wasn’t informed of his absence until ten past ten! If he really was missing, is that good enough? More than an hour-and-a-half later!

According to the Queensland Government’s “Managing student absences and enforcing enrolment and attendance at state schools procedure”, the school has a responsibility to “notify parents/carers of an unexplained absence of their child as soon as practicable on the day of the student’s absence (allowing time for parents to respond prior to the end of that school day)”. You could argue in court, I suppose, whether an hour and forty minutes constitutes “as soon as practicable”. I mean, he could have been in a different state by then and I would have never have seen my son again.

All this technology is there, presumably, to make things safer and more efficient, but in actuality, it failed miserably, and would have failed miserably if he really was abducted or whatever. I know it’s not the school’s fault – they just follow protocol dictated to them by the state government, but this just isn’t right, right? I think the only way that this can be fixed is to do away with these automated systems, and instead when the teacher marks the roll, if a student is absent, they immediately check with the office to see if the child is accounted for, and if not, the school should immediately contact the parents. There should be no delay. As it stands, the teachers just send through their marked roll, and then the systems take care of the rest. It seems like there is no urgency to confirm students’ whereabouts.

Anyway, that’s my little story. It was a horrible experience, even though it only lasted five-minutes, and even though everything ended up being okay. I really do now feel for parents who actually go through these circumstances in real life where their child actually goes missing. It would be absolutely devastating.

MUSIC
Melancholia by Godmode