Flash player is required to view weather conditions. Download

site web  

MASON — Parents complained to Mason school board members on Wednesday, Aug. 27 about receiving messages from school officials that their children were missing on the first day of classes last week.

One Mason mom, Kris Fritz, said she wants what she called an "unnerving" problem fixed.

Fritz told the board she was surprised to get a call from Mason Middle School on Tuesday, Aug. 21 stating her daughter, Lauren, was "missing."

School district officials said Wednesday night that the automated phone message was accidently sent at 12:30 p.m. to an undetermined number of parents on the first day of school. Mason Middle School has about 1,200 students.

One of the other parents who received the wrong call — school board member Kevin Wise. His son, Justin, is a seventh-grader at the middle school.

Fritz dropped her plans to go swimming and went — in her bathing suit — to get answers from the school.

When she arrived, about six other parents were waiting for answers from Principal Tonya McCall.

"(School employees) just kept saying, 'They're OK, they're OK,' " Fritz told the school board members.

She said she was dissatisfied with the response administrators, who eventually found her daughter in a classroom.

Fritz said she did receive another automated message from McCall apologizing for the error.

Now, she wants the district to figure out a plan to eliminate future false alarms.

"The worst thing that could happen is for us to not do anything," school board member Marianne Culbertson said.

Once all the students were located in the school, McCall sent phone and e-mail messages to parents to explain what had happened. And the principal apologized.

Fritz said she was confident the district would find a solution.

"When Mason knows that there's a problem, Mason fixes the problem," she said.

Contact this reporter at dwilson@coxohio.com or (513) 696-4541.