Tracking wandering children

Atlantic Beach resident Lesley Rothschild’s life has been made a bit easier thanks to a tracking device with which she can monitor her non-verbal autistic son’s movements.
The device, which fits him like an ankle bracelet but can also be worn on the wrist, can find him anywhere within a radius of four miles. It has a transmitter that sends out a tracking signal.
Rothschild said that the disappearance of Avonte Oquendo — an autistic boy from Queens who wandered away from his Long Island City school in October 2013 and whose body washed ashore in College Point, Queens, the following January — spurred her to find some way to locate her son quickly in an emergency.
“My son is a non-verbal autistic child,” she said. “He has sensory issues. This ankle bracelet works well for him because he can’t remove it.”
She got the tracking device a couple of weeks ago through a statewide program, a partnership between New York state and Project Lifesaver International, which was announced by Gov. Andrew Cuomo in May.
Rothschild recalled two frightening instances when her son slipped away, and the tracking device would have helped her find him faster. “One time, I found him in Reynolds Channel, in the water with a dog,” she said. “The other time, he was walking around Atlantic Beach in the streets, against traffic. We have the funding through New York state. I thought, ‘We have the funding, so let’s get this.’”
The partnership makes life-saving equipment and training available to 50 law enforcement agencies to speed up and improve searches for missing children. The state is providing police departments with nearly 600 Project Lifesaver tracking devices for special-needs children under 18 who have an increased risk of wandering and getting lost.