YES!

Before asking about the responsibility of schools, what about the responsibility of parents? You wrote that her family hadn't reported her missing. Do you mean that they KNEW she was missing (as opposed to visiting friends out of town) and chose not to report it? A call from the school would not have done any good in that case.

I do think there is a responsibility on the part of the school to contact homes when students are absent, but it's a often a real challenge. In a school with a high absentee rate, largely transient population, and hard-to-get contact information, it's often an impossible task.

Typical Sun reporter comment/question...Avalon is right. What about the parents' responsibility to report the missing child? In schools these days, what with budget cuts and high mobility rates of students, there are fewer and fewer people tasked to track down students who have (usually) simply either dropped out or moved on to a different school without telling the "former" school. I am sick and tired of the government being blamed for everything! What about some personal responsibility????

It happens fairly often that a student just stops coming. It's happening now; I haven't seen a student in my 4th period class in about three weeks. She gave me three numbers at the beginning of the year. The first two are disconnected, and the third one is going to an aunt or grandmother figure. I called. The first time, the woman hung up on me after I asked for "Mrs. _______". The second time, she said she didn't have a number for the girl or the mother, and was pretty rude and strange on the phone. This is certainly not an unusual occurrence. Working numbers are sometimes really hard to find. It's not just poverty and moving around - in this era, cell phone numbers can change a few times in a year even.