An Illinois school completely lost a child, and AirTag found him

A kindergarten school in Illinois lost a child on his first day, but his mother tracked him down through Find My and an AirTag she'd given him.

It's not clear whether the child knew about the AirTag, although when he's older you can bet he'll figure out how to leave it where his mother thinks he should be. And when he's much older, she may be hearing about the kid's psychiatry bill.

But for now, Shannon Stoker is glad to have snuck the AirTag into the six-year-old Stevie's backpack as he attended his first day at Founders Elementary School in DeKalb. According to Shaw Local News Network, the school told Stoker to say that her child had been absent all day.

"He could have been anywhere," Stoker said. "It was definitely running through my head that when the little bus came to pick him up in the morning that I put him on — 'Was that even a real bus? Did I ship him off with some predator?'"

"I kept staring at the AirTag," she continued, "and being like, 'If I had not had that AirTag, this would have been so much worse.'"

Stoker says that she had been checking Find My randomly through the day, and it always showed her son being at the school. However, the school bus was due to take Stevie to a children's center and Stoker phoned to check the details about picking him up.

Following that, the school phoned her at 3:58pm saying that Stevie was absent. At some point around then, Stoker lost contact with the AirTag, although it later resumed working.

She phoned 911 and Stevie's father, Andy Stoker, then tracked the AirTag to find that his son was on the school bus — but the driver and another employee denied it.

"There are two [police] officers there already with a drone looking for him," Andy Stoker says. "The bus driver said no. I was on with dispatch like 'There's no child with that name on this bus.'"

"I'm looking at my son and I go, 'He's right there. That is my child,'" continued Andy Stoker.

Reportedly three employees including the driver were adamant that the child in question was not Stevie. Andy Stoker says they insisted that "this is some other child, and he was getting dropped off somewhere else."

"It is insanity," said Shannon Stoker. "How could they not care about any of this? The school marked him absent and nobody called me all day long."

A second child went missing

It appears that Stevie was mixed up with another child at the school, possibly first thing in the morning. But that afternoon, a second child, Joah, was not on the school bus he should have been — and he did not have an AirTag.

Steven Ermilio and his wife found their son Joah after about 10 minutes, finding him crying on a street corner. Bus drivers are reportedly not allowed to let children off unless a parent collects them, but somehow Joah either had been — or was never on the bus.

Another child had seen Joah crying and fetched help from his own mother. That mother was trying to find Joah's parents when Steven Ermilio reached him.

The Stokers have now removed their son Stevie from the school.

Founders school has since apologized for what it described as "failures at almost everything" in the incident. That includes its automated system that should notify parents if a child has not attended school by 10:00 a.m.

AirTags are specifically designed for tracking objects, they are not intended to be used to track people. For all their usefulness, AirTags have also highlighted many problems of stalking.