Kindergarteners Left in a Park in Morris After School

It's every parents worst nightmare. Your child is on the bus for the first time and school has ended and they are not where they are supposed to be.
On Tuesday, it happened in Morris. In a big way. According to a story on US 99, a bus left children in Morris at a park Tuesday afternoon. First responders were called out to an area around Spruce and North to help locate all of the children who were dropped off in the wrong place. Unconfirmed reports are that the bus driver was arrested.

And it's not limited to Illinois. According to the Huffington Post, a similar incident happened in Florida.

When my oldest was in first grade, he got put on the wrong bus. He went to an after-school program at the time and it was that program that called when the bus landed to say that he was not on the bus and was he sick?

Panic set in. And on complete auto pilot, we began calling everyone. Turns out the school district put him on the bus to the house. No one was there. And it was the dead of winter. And he did not have a key. And he was in first grade.

The school district sent a bus back to get him. But how does that leave a parent feeling? It's even worse when the parent is working and his or her job is so far away from their home that they cannot get there quickly, as was the case for our family.

According to this blog, all the students in Morris were found right after the incident. But it begs the question: what do school districts do to prevent this from happening.

To answer that, Patch called Minooka Community Consolidated School District 201 Superintendent Al Gegenheimer.

"Today is our first day of kindergarten and pre-school so I have parents calling me," he said. "We hire our own bus drivers and we purchase our own buses. We kind of do a similar thing to what Morris is trying to do."

In an attept to save money, Morris merged its transportation department. In Minooka, both district 201 and Minooka High School District 111 share transportation services.

"We have been kind of sharing costs,"  Gegenheimer said. "As a result, we're pretty efficient, but we're not perfect and we make mistakes all the time."

In fact, yesterday, a third grader was on the wrong bus, but because of the proceedures in the district, that child was not left alone. The district trains children, teachers and bus drivers alike on stranger danger. Kids second grade and younger must have a responsible adult that the bus driver can see before they let a child off at a stop. They call that adult a safe side adult.

"When we come to a bus stop, kids second grade and younger, the bus drivers are looking for safe side adults," Gegenheimer said. "It takes a little but of time, but its a precaution.
"The bus drivers are told if they don't see a safe side adult, we bring them back to the school."

Those rules, though, don't mean mistakes never happen.

"They're not foolproof because people have to carry them out," Gegenheimer said. "We've had situations where children, they're mostly older kids, get off at their bus stops and go to their friend's home and mom doesn't know anything about it."

And, the district did have a kindergartener who fell asleep on the bus and ended up back at the bus barn at the end of the route.

"It's not uncommon for any primary-aged child," Gegenheimer said. "Those kids are just wiped out."

Efforts to reach the Morris School District for comment were unsuccessful.