Four-year-old with Down syndrome slips through fence, walks away from Florida school

From News4Jax in Jacksonville, Fla.:

JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- The family of a 4-year-old boy with Down Syndrome said it's mad and demanding answers after the child was found near a busy Northwest Jacksonville street after he wandered away from school.

Vivian Armstrong told Channel 4 that her 4-year-old grandson got out of a gate at Lake Forest Elementary School on Oct. 14.

Armstrong said she is angry, and called the fence at Lake Forest a danger after her grandson managed to slip through it while his teacher wasn't looking.

"I could cry. I could kill, literally, because it hurts every time I think about it," Armstrong said.

The boy was part of a pre-kindergarten class for special-needs children at Lake Forest Elementary. The children were outside playing when the teacher noticed the 4-year-old boy had escaped.

"The gate was locked. It had the chain-link closing it, but he was smaller than the four-inch opening of the gate and he shimmied right through," said Lake Forest Elementary Principal Kim Bays.

The boy made his way to Edgewood Avenue. The school said the teacher immediately called for help and the staff rushed out to grab the child.

The boy wasn't hurt, but his family says it was too little, too late.

"Edgewood, 95, the cars zooming by there. The stress that I've been going through is terrible," Armstrong said.

"We are as traumatized as they were. We all felt the heartaches and I reminded the entire faculty that we have to have eyes in the back of our head for anything that happens," Bays said.

The school said it would fix the gap in the fence. The chain-link has been tightened, and the grounds crew has been looking into what else can be done.

The boy's family said regardless, it's not letting their boy go back to the school.
"I don't feel they're responsible," Armstrong said. "You can't let him out of your sight at all."

The family said it believes the school was negligent and has contacted a lawyer.

The school said it has learned a valuable lesson from the incident. It said nobody could have imagined that the boy could fit through such a small opening.