First Grader Left Alone On School Bus For 30 Minutes In Front Of The Driver's House Because He Didn't Notice He Was There
The driver was clueless that anything was wrong. Instead, the boy's mother had to take action.
Monkey Business Images | Shutterstock One school bus driver didn’t take his responsibilities quite as seriously as he should have. He failed to drop a 6-year-old off at the correct stop and didn’t even notice he was still on the bus. It wasn’t until his mom called him that anyone knew anything was amiss.
Any job that requires working with kids has to be performed with an extra level of care and responsibility. When you’re helping to take care of the next generation, there’s an added sense of duty there. You’re not just liable for yourself anymore, and that’s a big deal.
The kid who was left on the school bus, Michael Sellars, was ‘traumatized’ by the experience.
Natalie Sellars, Michael’s mom, shared their story with Robert Brodsky, a reporter from Newsday, an outlet that covers news in the Long Island area. Sellars, who lives in Uniondale, New York, with her son, said that on June 17, when Michael was still in first grade, he was left alone on a school bus for nearly half an hour. He now refuses to ride the bus and is in therapy.
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Michael is a student at the Uniondale Union Free School District. He usually attends an after-school program at his elementary school, but it ended on June 17, so he was told to take the bus. He was supposed to be left at a predetermined stop where a babysitter would pick him up.
Instead, the bus driver, a former employee of Guardian Bus Company who was let go after the incident, skipped the stop and let older students who also participated in the after-school program off at the next stop. Michael did not know the stop, so he stayed on the bus. The unidentified driver proceeded to finish his route and drive home. He never noticed Michael was still on the bus, and he parked it outside his home and went inside.
Michael was on the bus alone for 30 minutes before first responders got to him.
Sellars was at work at the time, but was still aware that her son did not make it home. She called the phone he has for emergencies to find out where he was.
He showed her where he was on a video call, and she recognized a nearby landmark. She called 911 and relayed his approximate location. First responders worked with the school to find the bus driver’s address. The bus’s dashboard video showed that Michael was stuck alone from 3:39 to 4:06.
Sellars is grateful the situation wasn’t worse, as Michael has asthma and was without an inhaler at the time. Corey Muirhead, the executive vice president of Guardian Bus Company, apologized. “We have a zero-tolerance policy for a child left behind. It shouldn’t happen. But the driver is no longer employed by us,” he said.
School buses are supposed to be safe, but incidents like this still occur.
Interestingly, the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) noted, “School buses are the safest vehicles on the road, and one of the safest modes of transportation overall … [Children] are even safer riding in a school bus than in a car with their parents or caregivers.”
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Of course, the NTSB was referring to traffic safety, but still, it doesn’t seem like that statement is quite true in this situation. The NTSB also reported that there are almost 500,000 school buses in operation in the U.S., transporting over 25 million students. Truthfully, school buses are pretty safe, as you rarely hear about accidents involving them. But how does law enforcement deal with incidents like this, in which a student is simply forgotten?
The answer is unclear. Good school bus drivers shouldn’t be penalized for the mistakes made by careless ones, but there has to be a solution to leaving kids on school buses. Maybe some kind of alert system. No child should ever experience what Michael went through.
Mary-Faith Martinez is a writer with a bachelor’s degree in English and Journalism who covers news, psychology, lifestyle, and human interest topics.
