Kyron Horman's disappearance casts pall on last day of classes at Skyline School | OregonLive.com

Kyron Horman's disappearance casts pall on last day of classes at Skyline School | OregonLive.com

Kyron Horman's disappearance casts pall on last day of classes at Skyline School

Published: Monday, June 14, 2010, 8:25 PM Updated: Monday, June 14, 2010, 9:01 PM

Kate Mather, The Oregonian
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View full sizeTorsten Kjellstrand/The OregonianCapt. Jason Gates of the Multnomah County Sheriff's Office addresses reporters Monday in what he called the last regularly scheduled news conference on the disappearance of Kyron Horman.

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Classes end Tuesday at Skyline School with one second-grader noticeably absent from his desk in an otherwise cheerful light-blue room.

Kyron Horman's disappearance cast a pall over the final days of school as searchers crawled over the surrounding hillsides and roads looking for the missing 7-year–old with no success.

"Kids are being kids and laughing, but there's definitely a cloud over the school right now," said Portland schools spokesman Matt Shelby. "They're definitely concerned for Kyron and his family."

Authorities are now investigating the boy's disappearance as a criminal case and sent divers on Monday to Sauvie Island, where they were seen wading in waist-high water off the banks of the Multnomah Channel north of the island bridge. Others waded through a steep-sided ditch nearby.

The mystery of what happened to Kyron has captured national attention, though the investigation has centered on the immediate area around the small K-8 school in the rural northwest corner of Multnomah County.

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Kyron vanished from Skyline after showing off his science project on June 4. His stepmother snapped a photo of the boy in front of his project -- a picture now posted on store windows and bulletin boards throughout the region.

Shelby said Skyline is taking steps to provide support to their 300 students once school is out. Immediately after Kyron went missing, the school established a safe room filled with counselors.

"They've seen some different waves of kids coming in," Shelby said. "At the beginning of last week it was mostly younger students who didn't understand why Kyron wasn't in class, but toward the end of the week some of the middle school kids who didn't really know Kyron were having a hard time figuring out what they were feeling."

The services will be available to students throughout summer.

"We don't do this very often," Shelby said. "We have counselors that work with our students for a variety of things, but to have a missing classmate for this amount of time is pretty unprecedented for our folks. We don't know how it's going to play out