Mother concerned after she says school lost her child

“My stomach dropped to the floor, I started nearly crying, I panicked, I rushed to him. Nobody even knew the direction in which they were heading, nobody really knew where they were,” Michele Mace said.

It started out as a normal day for Mace. She got her 5-year-old son ready for school and sent him on the bus.

All was normal until she received a call from the Iona Elementary School secretary.

“She said, ‘Well, we had a parent call us and tell us your son is walking on the road of 55th,'” Mace said.

Wednesday was early release at the school.

Mace expected her son home around 11 a.m. that morning.

Instead, she was the one to pick him up a mile away from the school, where Kaleb was walking down the road with another kindergartener.

“That’s actually the same road where an 8-month-old toddler, 8-month-old baby had fallen into that canal and drowned this last summer, and on top of that, I already know that there are plenty of sex offenders in the area, and these two young boys were alone,” Mace said.

“We had a late bus, a bus was late, and we had some kindergarteners that had never experienced a late bus before, and although we have told them time and time again this is what you do in these circumstances we had a couple who chose to walk away,” Principal Brady Johnson said.

“As adults we cannot put the blame on 5- and 6-year-olds. The blame falls on us to take care of them,” Mace said.

“I apologize that this happened. As a father of a kindergartener myself , I completely share their deepest concern of what happened today and they have my assurance that this loophole will be filled that this is not something they have to worry about moving forward,” Johnson said.

“We by law have to send them to school or take the time to home school them. I’ve got two other children for the next 10 years I have to deal with Iona Elementary School …I am aware of this. But when I send them to the school I expect that they should be safe, they should know where my kids are. They should do everything in their power to make sure that they are not lost,” Mace said.

“I have a wonderful staff, a wonderful staff that cares about kids, we wouldn’t be in this job if we didn’t and so I feel that our supervision is great and adequate,” Johnson said.