Hector Ramsammy, 5, spent his first day of kindergarten wandering the hallway. (Photo courtesy New York Daily News)
It’s often frustrating to read stories about mix-ups involving the littlest learners, especially when it’s hard to know exactly what happened and why. Today’s New York Daily News, for example, carries a heart wrenching tale of a five-year-old boy wandering the hallways of his overcrowded elementary school in Queens after his mother fought to get him in the same zoned school where his three older siblings attend.
When school officials finally agreed to enroll the boy, they left him to wander the hallway with a teacher instead of putting him in a class.
“My feet hurt,” the boy told his mom after a day of walking instead of learning numbers and letters and meeting his new classmates.
There are plenty of other details in the story, and some are quite strange, including one that says the school inexplicably escorted the little boy home one day without reaching his parents first. The school did not answer questions about the incident, but the New York City Department of Education was spurred into action, the story notes.