A Call to Action

My mind stops me from going there, to the place Sierra LaMar’s mother has been for one month and two days. Quite possibly the worst nightmare a parent has is now the day-to-day reality of Sierra’s mother, Marlene, and her father, Steve. It’s a reality any reasonable person would refuse to wish on our worst enemy.

On March 16, Sierra left her Morgan Hill home at in the morning to catch the school bus. She never made it onto the bus. She’s not been heard from since. The beat of my heart starts pounding louder as I type the words “She’s not been heard from since.”

Were it one of my own children, I would hold out hope for all eternity. Hell, I hold out hope for Sierra, a 15-year-old girl I’ve never met and never heard of until a month ago. All the evidence suggests Sierra was abducted against her will. There’s no shred of evidence to suggest she’s a runaway, although surely that’s what everyone wants it to be.

A story I read a couple of weeks after Sierra disappeared has stuck with me, and it’s that story that brings to light the relevancy of her disappearance to our lives here in Novato. The Mercury News story noted “The day Sierra LaMar failed to get on the school bus at 7:15 a.m., teachers logged her into their computers as absent, hour by hour, throughout the day. But not until 6 p.m. – nearly 11 hours later – did Sobrato High School in Morgan Hill send an automated email and phone call to the mother of the teen.”

I’m one of those parents who calls the attendance hotline nearly every single time my child won’t be in school. In other words, I “clear” their absence. Only once have I neglected to call in, and I was called by the elementary school after two hours, asking about my kid’s absence.

I have, wrongly it turns out, assumed all along that I’d be contacted within an hour or two of the start of school that my child wasn’t in attendance.

According to Leslie Benjamin, NUSD’s public information officer, “NUSD does not have a policy about what time a parent is notified in the event the school has not been informed of a student’s absence.”

In response to my query to her about when parents are notified of students’ absences, Benjamin made calls to several NUSD schools to see what their policies were. For the elementary schools, the autodialer starts making calls between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. Personal calls are made by staff at the middle schools at about 11 a.m. Novato High staff start making personal calls by 11 a.m. and then the autodialer makes additional calls at about 5:30 p.m. for the remaining uncleared absences. At San Marin, no personal calls are made and the autodialer starts making calls for uncleared absences at 4 p.m.

What struck me in the Mercury News article was the statement that “most kidnappers with murderous intentions kill their victims within three hours.”

What’s the likelihood that a Novato child or teen is going to be abducted? Miniscule. What’s the likelihood that a Novato teen is going to skip school one day, go out partying and crash his or her car, injuring or killing people in the process? Not so miniscule.

With the proliferation of technology, why not have the autodialers go as soon as a student is marked absent in the first period the student is supposed to attend? Attendance at the middle schools and high schools, to the best of my knowledge, is computerized, providing instant communication to the office that a student is absent. Why not automatically text or email or call the parent as quickly?

NUSD certainly isn’t alone in lacking a unified policy for all schools nor in not having the autodialers start immediately. Most alerts appear to be designed to guard against students deleting messages left on home voicemails, with the presumption being it is truancy the school districts are fighting against. Nowadays, text messages or calls to parents’ cell phones or email notifications to them are the tools to use, completely eliminating the concern of students intercepting messages.

Tell me what I’m missing in understanding why we can’t alert parents about a child’s absence from school earlier. Tell me what I’m missing before a Novato child goes missing on her way to school.