A Fort Worth mother claims her son was locked inside a Fort Worth ISD classroom on March 1 without anyone’s knowledge.
“I went to pick up my son and niece from Eastern Hills Elementary. As usual, I waited in the dismissal line for them to bring out both of them. After about 10 minutes, my son never came out, so I went to the door to ask them where he was,” LaTissue Wallace told The Dallas Express.
“At this point, his teacher told me, as they [were] walking up, he ran off ahead, but she never sent anyone to check on him or to see where he was,” she said.
Wallace said that she began to look for her son and went to the restroom and the school office but could not find him. She eventually saw her son’s backpack in the classroom. She asked the assistant principal to get the janitor to open the classroom door.
“They open the door [and] my son was slumped over with his head hanging off the chair,” Wallace told DX.
She claimed this was not the first time such a thing had happened.
“Two years ago, at the same school, they put him on a bus when his backpack was tagged ‘Car Rider.’ It took us over an hour and a half to find him that day. So, this is an ongoing thing with negligence at the school,” Wallace claimed.
Wallace provided DX with screenshots from Facebook of the bus incident that allegedly happened two years ago, as well as screenshots of her chat with the principal regarding the most recent incident in which her son was locked inside the classroom.
She said that her son did not want to return to school because he fears that he would be locked in the classroom again.
“Fort Worth ISD is aware of the video at issue, and we are conducting a thorough investigation into this isolated incident,” the district said in a statement to NBC 5 DFW.
Wallace said she wants accountability and reassurance that an incident like this will never happen again.
In addition to its seeming issues with student safety, Fort Worth ISD has struggled academically for years, logging an 85.7% on-time graduation rate for the 2021-2022 school year. This may, in part, have led to a considerable decline in student enrollment figures, as extensively covered by The Dallas Express. Similarly, Dallas ISD has been losing students, with only 81.1% of its Class of 2022 graduating within four years.