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FWCS Tightens Student Safeguards: It's Updating System That Calls Parents of Absent Students.

Posted on: Tuesday, 7 March 2006, 15:01 CST

By Sheena Dooley, The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Ind.

Mar. 7--Fort Wayne Community Schools is taking steps to ensure parents are notified when their children don't show up for school.

The move comes almost three months after Maplewood Elementary fifth-grader Alejandra Gutierrez was last seen leaving for her bus stop. Her body was found Dec. 19 in a remote Delaware County woods. At the time, Alejandra's parents said they never received a phone call from the school telling them she wasn't there. The two employees responsible for making that call resigned after an investigation by the district.

Since then, district officials, including Superintendent Wendy Robinson, have worked with the Hispanic community in Fort Wayne to improve communications between the two. Schools also are in the process of updating an automated system that places calls to parents of absent students. Once the update is installed, the system will have the capacity to call parents in seven different languages, which officials will pick based on the makeup of their school.

"For the vast majority of kids who are late, there is no communication between the parent and the school," board member Jon Olinger said. "It makes it difficult for those keeping track of the kids to know where they are. I understand how that happens. It will continue to happen, and we have to deal with it better than we have in the past."

FWCS translated a safety brochure into Spanish and posted it on the district's Web site after meeting with Max Montesino and Donnie Foster, two members of the Hispanic community who expressed concern about how the district can better communicate with non-English-speaking parents.

Neither member expects the district to assume responsibility alone. They plan to make fliers and posters with safety information in Spanish for distribution throughout the Hispanic community, Montesino said.

Foster, who has a fourth- and a fifth-grader at Franke Park Elementary School, has met with FWCS officials separately to advocate giving children "code words" to protect them. Only people who know the code word would be allowed to leave with them.

"We are looking to the future so things like this incident will not affect any other family," Montesino said.

Administrators and board members also are looking into equipping buses with technology that allows students to "check in" by scanning an identification card. Olinger said he wants the district to do even more and to put in place a system in the middle and high schools to track students as they move from class to class. Handheld devices would tell teachers and administrators what class a student is in, where his or her locker is and more.

"We need to be able to track our students, and I think there are better ways of tracking them electronically than what we have right now," Olinger said. "I don't think it's a question of whether we move in that direction. The question will be, How much do we automate?"

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Is Fort Wayne Community Schools doing enough to protect students?

Sound off at .www.news-sentinel.com [http://www.news-sentinel.com.]

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Copyright (c) 2006, The News-Sentinel, Fort Wayne, Ind.

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Source: The News-Sentinel (Fort Wayne, Ind.)

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