"one child who has been very sadly left behind"

Gazette Letter: Schools could have done more to help find missing boy

In an article in The Washington Post, Dana Tofig, a Montgomery County Public Schools spokesperson, stated that with 147,000 students, it is not feasible to contact police simply because of unexcused absences [“Search for missing Germantown boy continues,” Oct. 14]. 

I would like to know just how many students MCPS currently has who have been unexcusably absent from school for more than a week? No, the police should not be notified of every single absence every day, but William McQuain was missing for eight days. 

Is this such a pervasive problem in MCPS that, should they notify the police of a student missing from school for as long as William was, the sheer number of reports would overwhelm the police department? When a child is missing for as long as William was, and without any word from someone on his emergency contact list on file at the school, I think the police might want to know about it. 

As I have read online articles from many different news agencies over the last few days, the comments are almost all the same — why didn't the school system notify the authorities about William's absence and their inability to reach someone who knew where he was? It is apparent that MCPS could have done more to help prevent the trail to finding William from growing cold. 

It is unfortunate that William's disappearance did not occur during [standardized] testing — I'm sure there would have been a much greater effort on behalf of MCPS to find out why he wasn't in school to participate in testing. He is one child who has been very sadly left behind. 

D.L. Ackerman, Germantown