We would like to think that our children with autism and other developmental disabilities are always safe at school. Unfortunately, we’ve all heard stories about students who have gone missing. In fact, nearly half of children with autism wander or ‘bolt’ from safe places.
According to researchers from the Interactive Autism Network (IAN):
- 49% of children with ASD attempted to elope at least once after age 4.
- Of those who attempted to elope, 53% of children with ASD went missing long enough to cause concern.
In addition to these facts, here are six other reasons to consider protecting a child with autism or other disability at school with AngelSense:
1. Proactive Safety
AngelSense’s technology performs non-stop proactive location monitoring.
This means that parents and school guardians receives a proactive alert in real time the second a child leaves the school boundaries. This removes crucial lag time and allows parents, staff and emergency personnel to respond immediately.
If a child hides indoors and escapes staff, the calling and alarm feature can be used to pinpoint the child’s location before they leave school grounds.
The service also ensures that if a child was on a bus both school staff and parents can monitor that the child arrived at the correct destination.
2. Emergencies
AngelSense allows for a child to be quickly found within the critical 30-minute time window using it’s features:
- Alerts and Notifications, alerting when a child leaves school, arrives at an unfamiliar place, unexpected bus stop, etc.
- Runner Mode with 10-second real-time location updates
- 2-Way Voice (AngelCall): to instruct a child to stop and guide them to safety
- Alarm: when activated, it produces a loud sound on the device to quickly find a child in a crowd, even if they’re hiding.
3. Enjoy Field Trips
AngelSense gives staff and parents peace of mind by always knowing the location of a child with elopement behaviors or anxiety in public situations while on outings.
With AngelSense, children with disabilities can enjoy being with their typical peers on field trips without risking their safety.
4. Establish Independence
Often times students with development disabilities have been assigned 1:1 aides for safety purposes in and around the building. With AngelSense, school staff can monitor a student while they are increasing their independence at school, allowing greater possibilities to socialize with their peers as well as master goals pertaining to transitions and establishing independence.
5. Transition Programming
As some adolescents grow into adulthood, their independence from school staff and parents may increase. AngelSense can provide a sense of assurance to know you and staff can always know of your child’s whereabouts or if they go beyond where they should be. Increasing independence improves quality of life and can improve work, community and independent living skills.
6. Tracking Arrival of School Bus and Other transportation Needs
Schools can monitor the arrival of the school bus and know exactly when to wait for the child by using the ETA and traffic information features.
Additionally, parents can be alerted if a child gets off at the wrong stop or stays on the bus after the bus run is complete.
I can’t begin to tell you how many times I have gotten calls from parents alerting me that their child went missing from school, got off at the wrong bus stop, or couldn’t be found within the school.
In these cases, we have always promptly initiated an IEP (Individualized Education Program) meeting to set up the use of Angelsense at school. We then make sure to include goals for safety and the use of the GPS in the IEP.
Print out my guide, Say Yes to GPS in the IEP, to incorporate AngelSense into the IEP.
