When Children Do Not Come Home

Time does not erase the pain of people whose lives have been turned upside down by the disappearance or murders of children. Nor does it reduce or eliminate the need to search for the missing or establish protocols when children do not come home.

Tom Schroeder, guidance counselor of the public school in Frankfort Kansas, knowingly took a very big chance of creating such a heartbreak for a family in his school district when he dumped a fourteen year old girl off by herself for cross country practice, four miles away from the school. When she did not return, he shrugged his shoulders and went home and had dinner. The girl's family was told that is the protocol for Frankfort, Kansas when a child disappears. Luckily, the strangers who picked up Schroeder's victim just took her back to the town from which she had been taken.

Quite a few of the locals in Frankfort, Kansas either do not understand the heartbreak caused when a child disappears, or perhaps they do, and it was planned for this family. Either way, the crass reactions of Frankfort Kansas are unacceptable, from blaming the victim to deriding the mother for not "just letting it go."

The video above details a case that started forty years ago, in suburban Maryland. Two young girls, Sheila and Katherine Lyon, ten and twelve years old, simply disappeared one day, in 1975, on their way home from Wheaton Plaza. The event illustrated, quite painfully, that protocols and immediate responses from law enforcement are necessary when a child goes missing. In stranger abductions, such as the case of the Lyon sisters, the victim is usually dead within three hours, according the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. The school board for Frankfort, USD 380, has expressed that it is comfortable with children accepting rides from strangers in order to return to school after having been left in random places by teachers.

Today marks the fortieth anniversary of the day that Sheila and Katherine Lyon disappeared. Hopefully, the newer avenues of investigation into the case will bring answers for their parents, John and Mary Lyon. Certainly, no further explanation should be needed by Frankfort, Kansas concerning why Tom Schroeder's actions toward the student he abandoned were criminal. If it was done deliberately, Frankfort High School should just accept the fact that the young lady finally came home safely, despite their criminal attempts, and leave the family alone.