A St. Paul teacher has accepted a five-day unpaid suspension after a kindergartner left her class in May and walked nearly a mile away from Como Elementary.
A neighbor found the child alone, apparently lost, at Arlington Avenue and Como Boulevard and called 911 at 2:45 p.m. on May 7.
The neighbor waited with the child for about a half-hour before the school district called police about a missing student, according to police records. The boy was driven back to school.
The 5-year-old boy began attending Como Elementary just two weeks before he went missing, according to an employee discipline letter the school district released in response to a Pioneer Press records request.
In that time, the boy had been found wandering the hallways more than once.
The boy’s teacher, Angela Birchland, told a district investigator she last saw the boy sometime between 2:30 and 2:45 p.m. and he might have walked out while students were in the hallway getting ready to go home. Como’s school day ends at 3 p.m.
Birchland didn’t know the boy was missing until an educational assistant returned to her class at 2:55 and noticed he was gone. Birchland initially disregarded the aide’s request that she call the office, according to her discipline letter.
“Your failure to follow basic standards and protocols of students’ attendance and provide active supervision … put the student at risk of serious harm,” reads the letter, signed by assistant superintendent Andrew Collins.
“The safety of Student A was in imminent danger and is extremely concerning considering the location, the distance from the school, level of vulnerability due to Student A’s age and immaturity level, and the amount of time Student A was missing from your classroom.”
Birchland told the district investigator she typically relies on her educational assistant to monitor students in the hallway near the end of the school day. On May 7, the aide was busy with two students in another part of the building.
“I’m trying to dismiss and trying to get them ready. I can’t straddle in between the doors to get things done,” the discipline letter quotes her as saying.
Birchland, who was hired by the school district in 1998, now teaches first- and second-graders at Como. She’d never been punished by the district before the weeklong suspension.
She declined to comment for this story.
