Boy goes missing from class for hours before his North York school realizes he's gone
By the time Tekeshia Allen received a phone call from her son's after-school program, her 10 year-old had been missing for hours.
"I was shaking," Khammani Allen's mother said upon learning at 4:15 p.m. that staff at Daystrom Public School had last seen the Grade 4 student during indoor recess at 2:30 p.m.
Allen left work on June 5 and arrived at the school to find staff calling Khammani's name over the speakers.
"I ran to his classroom and found his hat, his jacket, his backpack still hanging there," she said, noting that she had worried he had snuck off and been abducted.
"That was the most terrifying feeling I have ever had in my life."
To everyone's relief, Khammani showed up in the yard soon after.
Boy says he walked 4 kilometres to the mall
The relief, however, was undercut when Allen said her son told her he made the 45-minute walk to the Albion Centre mall — an incident that has since prompted the school to change its attendance policy. Now, teachers must do a roll call at the beginning of each class.
A spokesperson for the Toronto District School Board said the school realizes that it made a mistake.
"This shouldn't have happened," Ryan Bird said. "When the teacher was leading 30 kids down the hallway, that's when the student ran away and was not noticed."
Khammani's afternoon music teacher noticed the boy was missing, but assumed that he had been absent the whole day, Bird said.
Mother wants attendance policy changed boardwide
Initially, Bird said attendance was only taken in the morning but he has since corrected the information to say that it is also taken after lunch.
Considering her son was still able to bolt and go unnoticed, Allen fears others more children can slip through the cracks.
"You send your child to school in the morning only to come back and find that they've gone missing," she said. "No mother should go through that."
For extra measure, attendance sheets in each class will be compared with the head counts from previous classes to ensure no child disappears.
Allen said her family would appreciate a formal apology from the school, but what they would prefer would be to see the attendance policy applied across the board.
Bird, however, said that change is not something the board is considering.
