The other day a group of Reedsburg, WI 5th graders went on a field trip to some park in the Wisconsin Dells. One of them wandered away, was found by park employees, and rejoined the group. None of the adults noticed when he wandered away again.
By the time it was time to leave, they DID notice. They looked around a bit, informed park officials that a kid was missing, and they got on the bus and headed home. ALL if them, every single adult. Oh yeah, and they called his mom and told her they were leaving him there.
No one called the cops. Not one adult willing to stay to help search, or just to be a link between searchers and the kid’s parents.
The good news is that a couple of hours later a sharp woman motorist spotted the kid alone on a bench along a road, stopped and got his story, and drove him straight home to Reedsburg.
The school district said it has no policy on what to do if a child goes missing during a field trip.
This kind of story makes me wonder (for a split second) why I brought children into this world. It is so important to enroll your child in a reputable school! We moved our family north of Dallas last year for this very reason.
As horrible as the story is, it pales in comparison to the child left in the van after a field trip - he died. Thread’s in The Pit.
One thing, though. The kid wandered off twice? I’m wondering if maybe the kid has a history of ignoring what he’s told and the teachers finally got fed up with always holding up the entire class to look for him, so they left him behind to teach him a lesson.
My high school English teacher did this when three students decided to go get pizza right after she told everyone to get on the bus to go home. She saw that they were deliberately ignoring her, decided that she’d had enough, and told the bus driver to start the engine and go home. They caught a ride home with another different school’s bus, a nothing came of it.
Still, we were 12th graders in a city we knew, and she was the only chaperone. For all of the adults to decide to ditch a fifth grader? That’s pretty unbelievable, and someone needs to get called on it.
Same thing happened to my brother in 6th grade. His class went skiing, he lost track of time, and missed the meeting time at the lodge. So the entire group, teacher and 4 parent volunteers just left. There was a bus, and each of the adult volunteers had driven their own car, so it wasn’t like they would have had to hold up the entire class untril they found him. One of the women who went told mymother later that the teacher knew they were one kid short, but she figured he could call us from the lodge when he got in to come and get him. Nevermind the hill was a 3 hour drive from the school.
I don’t buy that whole ‘we don’t have a policy’ crap. Field trips are nightmares of policy, pages and pages of it, with every contingency spelled out in extreme detail. I’m willing to bet they have a policy-- to punish the child and parents by forcing mom and dad to come collect junior when he misbehaves. Thing is, the school is still in loco parentis (SP?) and responsible for the little booger. That means an adult stays behind to act as parent until the real one shows up. Christ on a cracker what a nest of dummies.
Exactly. There is always a policy. I’ve driven or gone along on the bus for more field trips than I can remember, and from preschool through middle school, there has been a policy. And that policy was never to leave anyone behind! I can’t even look at a group of children now without obsessively counting them. The main duty of a field-trip chaperone is to make sure all the kids are still with the group.
There’s a pretty big difference between high school and fifth grade. You don’t leave an elementary school child behind. Hell, I wouldn’t leave a fifth-grader behind even if the teachers told me to. What were the chaperones thinking?
I’m damned sure that if that happened here (especially with grade-school kids) that the supervising teacher/s would be sacked immediately. No ifs or buts about it.
Sometimes, with high-schoolers, the parent can sign a form to have the kid dismissed from the excursion rather than return to school afterwards. But this only happens if the excursion is to the CBD or some other close vicinity. It would NEVER happen on a trip to some more remote location, and even so, the kid would have to have been ‘accounted for’ before being allowed to head home anyway.
I think they said the same thing to us when we were in school, but as far as I recall it was only actually enforced when you were going to be departing on the field trip (get your little darlings to the pickup point on time, or they stay in the principal’s office that day and do homework), rather than returning, where it was just a threat to the kid, to make them think about the consequences of being alone with no way home.
My high school band had a marching band competition in Des Moines (and our town was on the Mississippi). On the way back, we left a guy behind (I think he was a freshman). I don’t recall any “be there or be left behind policy.” The volunteer who was in charge of the bus he was on (we took maybe 10 buses out there) noted that he wasn’t aboard, but just assumed he was getting a ride back. As I recall, not much was done to discipline her, as she was one of the most active volunteers and they didn’t want to piss her off.