Poll:
Should schools require ID when a student is released?
DALLAS — There were big changes at a Dallas elementary school Wednesday, one day after a kindergarten student was mistakenly released to the custody of a stranger — leading to hours of uncertainty and a police manhunt.
Police have identified the man who took the five-year-old boy as Roberto Paniagua. He is now in custody of immigration officials because he is not in the country legally. He also is named in outstanding warrants on unrelated charges from Mesquite.
Paniagua walked into Maple Lawn Elementary during the lunch hour on Tuesday and told a teacher he was there to pick up a child, but he took home another boy with a similar name.
The Dallas ISD promised a review of their student release policies.
The district did make a change, but only at Maple Lawn, and only for a limited time: Parents are required to go into the school building to pick up students.
"It may be a little more cumbersome of a process, and it may take a little more time, but it's all in the interest of safety that they're going to need to sign out their child and present an ID," said district spokesman Jon Dahlander, adding that the procedure is only temporary while teachers are learning to recognize who normally picks up a child from school.
That concerns Rosa Delgado, who kept watch on the school for four hours Wednesday morning. "We are afraid that something like that will happen with my daughter," she said. "It's bad."
The precautions being taken at Maple Lawn have not been imposed district-wide. Two miles away, at Medrano Elementary, adults walked off with kindergarten children without so much as word to a teacher.
"When he was coming out, I just grabbed him," said Mary Zambrano, the mother of a student at Medrano.
Maria Duque picks up her grandchildren at the school. "They know me already," she said. "I've been riding kids for 20 years, so they know me already. But there's new people, they should ask for ID."
But, they didn't.
In fact, at Medrano — and at other DISD schools — attendance fluctuates tremendously through Labor Day. Medrano is still about 100 students short of projected enrollment.
School officials admit that makes matching youngsters with their guardians very challenging.
We pressed DISD throughout the day about why there aren't additional safeguards — or a district-wide policy — for the release of students, especially at the beginning of the school year when teachers don't yet recognize parents, or baby sitters, or carpools.
A DISD representative told News 8 that administrators are carefully evaluating each campus before deciding if they need a uniform dismissal policy that would affect the district's 100,000 elementary students.
E-mail jstjames@wfaa.com
