BAR HARBOR, Maine — In the wake of an incident earlier this month in which a local 5-year-old girl was lost for two hours after a school substitute bus driver let her off at the wrong stop, school officials are implementing some changes to try to prevent similar mishaps.
The incident that has prompted the changes happened on Nov. 9 when a substitute bus driver working for Cyr Bus Lines of Old Town, which is contracted to provide student transportation services to the Mount Desert Island school system, let the girl off at the wrong house on Crooked Road, according to Conners Emerson School Principal Barbara Neilly. The school serves children in Bar Harbor from kindergarten through eighth grade.
The bus driver had an outdated list of which pupil was supposed to get off where, Neilly said Monday evening. Earlier in the school year, the girl had been getting off the bus at the home of her baby sitter, which is located about half a mile away from where she lives, but by Nov. 9 the girl had been getting off the bus at her own home for several weeks, the principal said.
The bus driver pulled up to the baby sitter’s house and, though no one was there at the time, told the girl that was where she was supposed to get off, according to the principal. Regardless of whether the bus driver’s drop-off list was accurate, she said, the driver violated policy by not making sure an adult was there to greet her.
“You don’t let a kindergartener off the bus unless a [waiting] adult is visible,” Neilly said.
The girl went inside the house, which was unlocked, and went to sleep, according to Neilly.
Down the road at the girl’s regular stop, her grandmother was waiting when the bus pulled up without her on it. When the grandmother asked the driver where the girl was, the driver could not recall where the girl had gotten off the bus.
“The driver was unclear,” Neilly said.
In the ensuing search, people went to the baby sitter’s house to look for the girl, and someone even opened the front door and called her name, but the girl never responded. It wasn’t until the homeowner arrived home and went inside, two hours later, that the girl was found in the house safe and sound.
Local police officers, state game wardens, firefighters, school staff and others all participated in the “frantic” search for the girl, Neilly said.
A voice mail message left Tuesday for Rick Soules, general manager of Cyr Bus Lines, was not returned. A woman who answered the phone Tuesday at the Old Town company said Soules was out of the office for the day and was the only Cyr official authorized to comment on the incident.
Neilly said she believes the driver has been reprimanded by Cyr officials for not following protocol when he let the girl off the bus. She said the school “routinely” makes phone calls to parents to make sure children are accounted for and that all the school’s buses are equipped with radios that allow drivers to contact the school’s main office at any time.
The substitute driver, she said, should not have let the girl off the bus at the unattended home and should have radioed the school office to find out what to do.
The principal said school officials met with police and the girl’s parents last week, days after the incident, to discuss what had happened and how to prevent similar incidents.
In a letter sent out Nov. 14 to parents, Neilly said the school would pursue several changes to ensure that students get home safely. Those changes include:
• Getting from Cyr a list of student names and home addresses for each bus and providing copies of those lists to the Bar Harbor Police Department.
• Providing local police with the frequencies for the school bus communication radios.
• Updating the school office answering machine to include contact numbers for Cyr and for local police.
• Having each driver note attendance on the bus of each pupil from kindergarten through fourth grade before it departs the school.
• Have kindergarten and first-grade pupils wear identification labels with their home address and phone numbers on them whenever they are on a bus with a substitute driver.
Neilly said Cyr is new to providing student transportation services to the school and is in the first year of a five-year contract to do so.
She said the transition from the school’s prior bus company, First Student, to Cyr has not been smooth. She said there was a prior incident this fall in which another pupil got onto the wrong bus and was dropped off a few blocks short of the local YMCA, his intended destination. That pupil’s parents were waiting for him nearby and spotted him quickly, so no search resulted from that mix-up, she said.
“It’s an ongoing process, until we get this right,” Neilly said of putting measures in place to ensure pupils get to their intended destinations on the appropriate bus. “We will continue to review [Cyr’s] performance.”
Follow BDN reporter Bill Trotter on Twitter at @billtrotter.
Glad the little lost scholar is OK.
So many caring people looking out for her.
Glad this is Maine, cause it might not be so safe elsewhere.
Serious retraining needed for the substitute driver.
and the parents and child too.
I have never met Ms. Neily, but have spoke with her on the phone over the years. She seemed to be as was reflected by those repopting this incident a very caring individual who goes to great length’s to make sure her students are safe.
The bus driver couldn’t remember where he dropped her off despite the fact that it had only been half a mile earlier?
Sounds like my memory.
Oh I’m so glad I had my boys 30+ years ago. When my youngest was in kindergarten and getting off the bus, I frequently wasn’t home. He would go in, make his lunch and go watch TV. He was thrilled to be all by himself and not have any of the other 5 members of his family around. What would he be doing in this day and age?
Parents used to teach their children what to do if no adult was around or a mistake occurred. Any of my children would’ve picked up the phone and called home the moment they went into the babysitter’s house or if close enough, would’ve walked home and complained that they had a stupid bus driver who wouldn’t listen to them when they told him this is the wrong stop!
OH, my gawd! It is not a perfect world??
Substitute driving is the worst job in the world. It’s impossible. The driver couldn’t remember because he/she didn’t have a clue which kid was which, nor the grade level of the student. The driver was probably very nervous that exactly what happened might happen and certainly didn’t mean to do something wrong. It may have been short notice when the person had to do that run and s/he might not even have been familiar with the Island. It’s a frightening thing to have happened for all concerned, but blaming a “spare” bus driver is unkind and unfair. Remember, the child was in no danger at any time, just misplaced and thankfully at familiar location. The driver is no doubt very upset too. It is unkind of the administrator to continually point the finger at the bus driver and company. It’s a mistake everyone fears, but be clear that at the end of the day, school staff put kids on the buses and their responsibility is over. I am certain the driver is feeling badly and that the company staff are issuing appropriate remedial measures as well.
No, I do not work for Cyr Bus. :o)
I went to school in Bar Harbor and Connors School. Brings back memories.
This issue seems to crop up every year; seems to me that DOE ought to establish some rules to prevent this from happening before something tragic happens……….
You know that the weakest link in the pupil transportation industry is the spare driver issue. The spare driver cannot possibly know all of the children who ride on the many routes he or she drives. In forty odd years in school busing, I have not been able to figure out a fix, try as we may and we do try. There is expensive technology available to ID and photograph each child getting on and off the bus. That would eliminate this type of error, but most districts and contractors of the sizes in this part of Maine are not able to afford it.. So we do the very best that we can and thank God when all of our kids are safe.
It is so easy to place blame in these types of incidents, but what purpose does that serve? That poor bus driver is already facing his or her own internal judges. You know, retraining wouldn’t fix that particular problem. What are you going to train that person to do next time? The driver had old information that maybe the regular driver didn’t see a need to update or what if the updated information had not yet been input to the system? I find that when I have to substitute drive, a job I hate more than anything, my best resource is the other kids on the bus, but that has to be done in a controlled fashion or one gets too many helpers.
I challenge all of the critics to license up and drive a school bus. You will find that the kind of incident that happened can happen to any of us. That’s a statement I learned long years ago from a supervisor I had. Now as a supervisor myself, I use the same words over and over again. Mistakes happen to any of us and criticism rarely helps, especially coming from people who don’t know what we have gone through or what the job entails.
Again, I don’t work for Cyr Bus, but I would be proud if I did.
When I was very young my parents tried to convince me that I had been dropped off at the wrong house by a new school bus driver and I was not their child. I didn’t take the bait though and stayed right there. However, during middle school they moved away when I attended an overnight sports camp. Seriously folks-THIS ISSUE IS WAY PLAYED!
We have not had good luck with this bus company, From not stopping at consistent times, to sometimes just not showing up at a bus stop with no warning. It was so much better when the schools employed their own drivers and didn’t farm out the work, I can’t imagine Sue or Mr Linscott dropping someone off at the wrong house.