Mayor de Blasio Issues Stern Warning After Special Ed Teen Disappears from School

The Department of Education is investigating what went wrong at the special education high school where a teenage girl went missing on Monday. Nashaly Perez-Rodriguez, 15, was found unharmed early Thursday morning; police said she was with a friend.

The principal of Lillian L. Rashkis High School, Joan Antonelli, was removed from her position Wednesday. And Mayor Bill de Blasio said unacceptable behavior by school staff would not be tolerated.

"I want to be clear that anybody who works for me, and that means everyone at the DOE, is going to be held to a very high standard," he said. "Anyone who had responsibility is going to feel some consequences, because it's just unacceptable that we don't watch out for every child, particularly our children with special needs."

The girl's mother, Sandra Rodriguez, said Nashaly had a full-time paraprofessional assigned to monitor her at the school. She has been diagnosed with a mood disorder and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. She was hospitalized four times over a two-year period, and takes medication for hallucinations and suicidal mediations.

But Rodriguez claimed that when she showed up at the school at 1 p.m. on Monday to pick her daughter up early, the paraprofessional informed her Nashaly had been missing for roughly an hour. Rodriguez said the school had never contacted her about her daughter's disappearance. She said school officials told her cameras captured her daughter sneaking out an unmanned backdoor in the building.

Principals are supposed to call 911 once it's confirmed that a student has exited the building. Rodriguez claimed the school did not call police and that she placed the call to 911, herself. If true, this would appear to violate protocols. Last fall, the Department of Education sent principals a reminder of the protocols for what to do when a child is missing after a teenager, Avonte Oquendo, disappeared from his school for children with special needs.  His body was found months later.

Parent leader Gloria Corsino is troubled by what happened at the Brooklyn school. She is president of the community education council for district 75, which is for children with serious disabilities. "I think we need to go back to the drawing board," she said, referring to last year's actions by the Department of Education, which also included retraining for school safety agents.

She said it seems like it's time to retrain other school staffers about children with special needs.

"I think mistakes can happen at any level," she said. "I think that we always have to, as a team, look at ourselves and say what can we do better?"

David Perecman, the attorney who represented Avonte Oquendo's family, said he was also troubled that another child with special needs went missing just less than a year after Avonte's disappearance. He is currently representing the Rodriguez family.

"I don't really think the Department of Education has really made much in the way of changes," he said. "Nor has the school safety division of the Police Department to try to make sure the children like this do not get out of school. Particularly a child like this."