Two kindergarten students in the Renton School District were put on the wrong school bus Friday and dropped off along a busy highway more than a mile from their day-care center.
The students, who attend Benson Hill Elementary School, rode the bus to the last stop — where the bus driver dropped them off, said Randy Matheson, a district spokesman. “All adults failed to do what they were supposed to do,” said Matheson. “We were wrong.”
When the bus hit the last stop the driver told the two children to leave, Matheson said.
The bus driver was a substitute, and the district won’t use him again, he said. “But that’s no excuse.”
The 5-year-olds, a boy and a girl, were too young to alert the bus driver about the mistake so, after they were dropped off, they tried to walk to their day-care center about a mile and a half away on a busy street, the Benson Highway, Matheson said.
The day-care center contacted the school when the students weren’t aboard the bus that was supposed to deliver them, Matheson said. Police were notified and school staff members went to where the children were left to search for them. Classmates were contacted to make sure the pair didn’t go home with another student.
Meanwhile, one of the day-care workers at Spring Glen Day Care Center, where the children attended, was leaving work and was in her car when she recognized the children walking along the roadway and returned them to the day-care center.
One father had shown up at the center looking for his child.
The principal at the school has put in place a new process to make sure this won’t happen again, Matheson said. The school will make sure the students are put on the right buses, and the drivers will have lists to match the children with their bus stops. The school will also color-code the bus stops so younger students won’t get lost.
“We were wrong for letting them off at the wrong stop,” Matheson said.
In the Seattle School District, there’s a policy that for the first two weeks of school, bus drivers have a checkoff list for their students riding the bus, said Teresa Wippel, spokeswoman for the Seattle Public Schools. That’s why buses are late the first days of school, she said. The checkoff list is a way for the drivers to become familiar with the students and their names, and have a good count of those on their buses.
Tom Bishop, head of transportation for the Seattle district, said some parents are annoyed at the checkoff list because it makes buses late, sometimes up to two hours late, but the districts believes its necessary to ensure the student’s safety.
Beginning this week, there is no checkoff list, he said.
Sometimes, there are cases where students aren’t on the bus because they’ve gone home with a friend without notifying the bus driver, Bishop said.
The district also trains all drivers that if a student shows sign of anxiety when he gets to his stop, such as when a parent or family member is not there to meet him, the driver must keep the student on the bus and call the dispatch center, which will try to reach a family member. This happens frequently, Bishop said. “The system really, really works,” he said.
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