SAN ANTONIO – A Northside ISD bus driver dropped off a five-year-old boy at the wrong location Wednesday from Cable Elementary.
“I don’t know what to do. I’m in shock, disbelief,” the child’s parent, Breona Terry said.
She described the pain she felt when her son’s bus never showed up outside of her apartment complex at its regularly scheduled time.
“Cable Elementary is supposed to bring him to me. They lost…him because no one called me,” she said.
Terry called the school’s administration office and the district’s transportation department for answers.
“You all keep saying, ‘I’m sorry. This shouldn’t have happened to you.’ I understand that but, it happened. So what are we going to do to change it? What are we going to do to fix it?” she asked.
Terry is a single mother without a vehicle and she signed paperwork giving the bus driver authorization to only release her son outside her home.
“He can get released to me. No one else…they just let him go off,” she stated.
Nearly an hour later, she received a call from a woman at an apartment complex 32 minutes away who found her son wandering outside. The woman opened his backpack and found a note with Terry’s phone number on it.
“I appreciate her, you know, because it’s not too many good people in this world. So just imagine, like, if no one called me, if my number wasn’t in the bag, anything could have happened to him,” she said.
Northside ISD released this statement:
“We are investigating what may have prompted or contributed to the student getting off at the incorrect location. We believe a contributing factor may have been that the student enrolled at the campus Nov. 15 is new to both the school and bus route.
Regardless of the factors, this should not have happened and we will take necessary measures to ensure this incident does not happen again. We extend our apologies to this student and his parents.”
Terry said she is unsure if she’ll allow her son to ride the bus again. She wants the drivers involved to be held accountable.