An amber alert is needed now

 Charles Ungerleider, Professor Emeritus, The University of British Columbia

[permission to reproduce granted if authorship is acknowledged]

 It is around this time of year that school boards report to their provincial and state agencies the numbers of students enrolled. Student numbers affect everything: school board funding, meal preparation and distribution, the organization of classrooms, the deployment of teachers and more. When students are missing from school it has consequences for them, their families, and the communities in which they live. It is global concern and fundamentally a child protection issue.

While missing students are obviously absent from school, students who are absent may not be missing (unaccounted for). I have expressed my concern about absent students in an earlier blog. The one you are reading now is about the students who have not shown up for school this year.

I read an article from October 9^th about the NYC Department of Education issuing a directive to principals to find the missing children and youth. Why such a directive is necessary boggles the mind, but, if it is needed, I’m for it. Finding the missing students should obviously involve the schools in which the students are enrolled, because schools presumably have a relationship with the student and the student’s family. But efforts should be a top priority for every level of the education system and beyond.

While there are many things the education system can do to find the missing students. The education system will need the cooperation of other agencies, including social welfare and income assistance, public housing authorities, justice, health and mental health, sport and recreation, etc. I fear that agencies beyond the education system will be hesitant to cooperate with the education system because of the protection of privacy.

Protection of privacy for the students and their families is not a trivial concern. When privacy is breached, its impact can range from stigmatization of the child and her family to the use of student and family information to perpetrate criminal activity. Governments cannot leave to school boards alone the responsibility of negotiating the complex privacy issues that pertain to finding the missing students.

Students missing from school is a child and youth protection issue that has been magnified by COVID-19. It is a social emergency. Governments must respond as they do when there are large scale natural disasters. Governments must use the power that is vested in them to ensure that privacy concerns are not a barrier to finding the missing students. Using those powers and working with their protection of privacy personnel, governments can craft emergency powers that remove the obstacles to information sharing among agencies.

Governments should create a provincial or state body with the authority to oversee the efforts to find the missing students, removing bureaucratic and other barriers, ensuring rapid communication, and accountability. At a minimum, the coordinating body should include senior officials from ministries and departments of education, social welfare and income assistance, public housing authorities, justice, health and mental health, sport and recreation, etc.

An amber alert is issued when a child is suspected of having been abducted in the community where I live. Its purpose, among others, is to alert the entire community and engage every citizen in attempting to locate the child or youth. We need similar signals and efforts until we can locate and return every student who should have been in school this school year.