Complaints are soaring that young tykes are being left on their own in public schools around the city — with one kindergartner forgotten during a class outing at a Chuck E. Cheese’s, according to a blistering report Tuesday.
Special Schools Investigator Richard Condon called the findings so “disturbing” that he twice met with Chancellor Carmen Fariña and her chief of staff to discuss the potentially dangerous situation.
Condon said his office received 142 complaints in the first four months of 2015, compared to 78 in the same period last year, about “unsupervised” students in grades from pre-K to third, making them as young as 4.
“The complaints ranged in severity from classes left unattended for short periods of time and children left behind in a classroom or bathroom . . . to children dismissed to the wrong adult, to children put on the wrong bus or left on the bus and children who walked out of the building or schoolyard to head home alone,” Condon wrote in a letter to Fariña.
He said all the complaints had one common element: school staffers who failed to do their jobs.
“The overwhelming number of these children were not harmed, although often they were in harm’s way,” Condon said.
In one case, a kindergarten student on a class trip to a Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant last June was left behind when everyone else exited. Someone eventually realized the child wasn’t accounted for and returned to retrieve him.
The school that was involved in the incident was not identified.
Condon said a likely reason for the increases in complaints was the widely publicized death of Avonte Oquendo, the 14-year-old autistic student who died after walking out of his Queens school in October 2013.
In 2014, investigators received 279 complaints about unsupervised students, compared with 159 in 2013.
Nine staffers have already been disciplined for failing to monitor meandering students, and eight cases are pending.
Condon and Department of Investigation Commissioner Mark Peters recommended the Department of Education prioritize installing alarms in schools that serve autistic students, train school safety agents about potential hazards and shift more personnel to oversee school dismissal.
Fariña said the city is already re-training staff and has begun installing door alarms in all schools.
“We are taking aggressive actions to ensure all students are in safe learning environments,” she said.