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Student elopement occurs when a student leaves a designated area without permission. These incidents put vulnerable students at risk and interfere with other students’ learning. Mild forms of elopement may be simply disruptive and annoying, as when students leave their seats or do not wait in line. In more serious instances, students may run, literally leaving their classrooms, school buildings, and even school grounds.

To intervene in or prevent elopement, teachers must act immediately. In some situations, teachers are forced into unsafe situations. Therefore, efforts to address student elopement must prioritize the safety of the eloping student and the staff member working with that student. When safety plans and technologies focus on preventing student elopement, these plans make everyone safer.

Student Elopement Impacts Everyone

Elopement is dangerous. When students elope from a supervised area, they are more likely to be involved in traffic-related injuries, drowning incidents, and other accidents. When they leave school, they enter unfamiliar surroundings without parental or teacher supervision. Though students elope for various reasons, incidents of elopement are higher among students with intellectual disabilities or autism spectrum disorder and those identified with or at risk for emotional and behavioral disorders. Student elopement occurs in about 34% of individuals diagnosed with intellectual and developmental disabilities and about 49% of individuals diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder. Elopement puts these kids at risk of physical harm and increased emotional distress during and after the incident.

Student elopement is also disruptive for the students and teachers present during an incident. Because elopement often requires teachers to react immediately to prevent students from leaving instructional contexts, teachers must often exit the classroom. This leaves other students unsupervised. In other cases, the teacher’s attention may be absorbed by an elopement incident for some time, even if they aren’t obligated to leave the classroom. This interrupts instruction for all students. These stressful situations add to teacher and student anxiety and are a hardship for everyone involved. 

Student Elopement: Root Causes

“Goal-directed elopement” is running away from a non-preferred setting or toward a preferred destination, item, or activity. Students also sometimes “wander” or move away from a supervised area slowly without clear direction. There are two primary reasons a child may exit their surroundings quietly and without explanation: to leave a situation they deem to be negative or to pursue something they want. Unfortunately, when adults act upon the natural response to run after the student, this is often an unintentional reinforcement; the student may receive the message that, if they leave, they will gain their teacher’s undivided attention. 

Elopement often occurs when a student becomes stressed, anxious, or emotionally overloaded. For students with intellectual disabilities or autism spectrum disorder, these stressors can become unbearable. As a result, students often elope to simply get away from a situation that feels torturous. Leaving a negative situation is a way for students to cope with noise, commotion, phobias, and demands. For students who have challenges with coping, calming, or regulating their emotions, running away might feel like their only option to avoid these difficulties. 

This situation is perilous because students with intellectual or developmental disabilities and autism spectrum disorder may not have the same level of awareness that a neurotypical child might have. Whereas a neurotypical child usually intuitively knows to avoid dangerous situations like entering traffic, wandering the city alone, or entering a stranger’s car, kids with certain disabilities may not. To avoid scary outcomes like these, educators are seeking to understand the root causes of elopement and to develop intervention strategies.

Elopement Prevention Measures

Various strategies exist for preventing student elopement, from behavioral interventions to physical alterations of the classroom. Experts on autism spectrum disorder advocate several preventive measures schools can implement to prevent elopement:

• Establish a safe area with clear, physically marked boundaries. Schools should designate a safe space within a classroom, hallway, or other rooms as a “safe wandering area” and establish this boundary with students at risk of elopement.
• Place people strategically. Place students who are prone to elopement away from the door. When possible, teachers or other adults should be positioned near the student and the entrance to redirect students trying to leave the room.
• Include all staff in the safety plan. Even staff who do not teach the student can intervene. Train staff in a schoolwide elopement plan and equip them with the appropriate technology to alert others and assist when needed. 
• Collect relevant data about each student’s elopement behaviors. Understanding the circumstances before and during an elopement incident can inform a school’s future prevention efforts. 

Elopement Response Protocols 

If a student is able to slip away, schools must have an established response protocol in place, and staff must be trained to implement it. The plan must include concrete guidance about how staff members respond when a student leaves the school or another designated area without permission. The steps in an elopement plan might consist of the following directives:

1. A teacher, aide, or adult follows the student.
2. The adult alerts the support team through a schoolwide communication system.
3. Designated adults go to exit doors and monitor them.
4. The adult with the student reports ongoing events and the student’s condition.
5. The team makes a plan to return the student to the learning environment.
6. After the student is safe and returned to supervision, the safety team will review the incident.
7. The team documents the incident and informs the student’s parents.

Each step focuses on the safety of the eloped student and gives staff clear directives. This detailed plan eliminates in-the-moment thinking that may be counterproductive, thereby increasing staff members’ confidence in dealing with the complex problem of student elopement. This plan also provides a critical opportunity for adults to debrief and strategize to be more effective in the future. Clear response protocols like these allow teachers and other staff to exercise agency, and they keep students safe. 

Collaboration is Key

Incidents of student elopement can have a disruptive impact on students and staff throughout an entire school. But in schools where a team collaborates on creating a clear elopement prevention plan—and provides adequate training—these incidents’ impact can be minimized. For a school safety plan to work effectively, school adults must work as a team. Classroom teachers, special education teachers, paraprofessionals, instructional aides, administrators, and others must work together to prevent and respond to elopement. When everyone in the school is on the same page about how to respond to student elopement, these incidents begin to feel less like schoolwide emergencies and more like problems with a solution. 

Communication is critical to this kind of teamwork. A schoolwide communication system that can alert designated adults and first responders during elopement incidents keeps kids safer and nurtures a safety culture within a school building. Combined with the renewed emphasis on social-emotional learning that is gaining traction in schools, concrete school safety plans can create a calm atmosphere conducive to learning. A plan that incorporates prevention, intervention, response, and reflection can effectively address the complex problem of student elopement.