Student with special needs went missing from Fresno campus. Was school ‘covering it up?’
A student with special needs at Fresno Unified’s Ahwahnee Middle School went missing briefly last week, managing to get off campus and across a street. District employees say the incident highlights the need for more support staff in Fresno-area schools, especially in high-needs classrooms.
It took school employees just under 15 minutes to locate the student, who had wandered across the street. The student was not hurt.
“Thank God that he didn’t go too far (or) get hit by a vehicle,” said Michael Haynes, a campus safety assistant at Ahwahnee who helped search for the student. Haynes added that the student is in eighth grade and is nonverbal.
The incident occurred Sept. 15 as students returned from lunch to class, district spokesperson Diana Diaz confirmed in an email to The Bee’s Education Lab Thursday afternoon. She added that the student left campus through a fire lane gate that’s usually locked but is sometimes opened by maintenance.
After an educator notified Haynes that one of her students was missing, a team of campus safety assistants and administrators canvassed the campus looking for him. A staff member coming through the school’s gate noticed the student and reported it. The team then located the student in a grassy area on the corner of Escalon Avenue and Fourth Street, where Haynes added there are high-voltage wires.
The school contacted the student’s family about the incident the same day, Diaz said.
“Appropriate disciplinary action has been taken in regards to the staff responsible for the student’s supervision during the lunch transition,” she added.
Ahwahnee Middle School sits on Escalon Avenue between First and Fourth Streets in Fresno Unified’s Hoover High area.
Trustee Claudia Cazares, who represents the area on Fresno Unified’s school board, said that the Hoover region has a high percentage of the district’s special needs students, although it’s lower than in past years.
“We do care deeply about our students’ safety. We have invested heavily over the last several years to make sure these things don’t happen,” she said. “And while we try to ensure that they don’t happen, staff does react quickly to resolve issues, like the case at Ahwahnee.”
Trustee Terry Slatic, the Bullard-area board member, said that the district “dodged another bullet” with this incident. He also spoke out at last week’s school board meeting about a parent he said made it all the way to a classroom during Bullard’s lockdown in response to a false active shooter threat, a claim district officials said they couldn’t confirm or deny.
“We can’t keep hoping for the grace of the Almighty to not have dead kids or parents,” he said. “Yes, he didn’t get snatched and thrown into a van or something else, and he wasn’t run over by a truck. But there’s a million other options we could all go through.”
Slatic said the school didn’t report the incident to the district office immediately, but only after he and other employees at the school started asking questions.
“No one ever got called,” Slatic said. “They’re covering it up.”
Cazares said this was likely because the administration located the student quickly.
Diaz confirmed there was “no notification of the incident to the district office” but that the Ahwahnee administration has since debriefed with district staff.
Ahwahnee is now considering installing an electronic gate and frequent monitoring of the gate to ensure it’s locked, Diaz said.
Haynes said such incidents are a result of the district “being cheap” and not hiring enough substitutes or full-time staff. Slatic also said that turnover for the district’s paraprofessionals, who are the “frontline people” working with students that have special needs, is a problem for such a demanding job.
Stephanie Vasquez, president of Fresno Unified’s chapter of the California School Employees Association, said in a text to the Education Lab that the district has struggled with paraprofessional turnover for years.
“The job is not enticing in pay at all,” she said. She shared that the pay for various types of paras all hover around minimum wage.
In an Aug. 12 interview, Fresno Teachers Association President Manuel Bonilla also spoke about the need for paraprofessionals, especially to support special education classrooms.
In an email to the Ed Lab earlier this month, district spokesperson Nikki Henry shared that of the district’s 19 employee vacancies as of Aug. 24, almost all of them were in “hard-to-fill” areas, including special education.
The Education Lab is a local journalism initiative that highlights education issues critical to the advancement of the San Joaquin Valley. It is funded by donors. Learn about The Bee’s Education Lab at its website.
