BENTON CITY, Wash. – After getting on the wrong school bus, a kindergartener was missing for an hour on September 5. The student was safely returned to his mother.
“I was waiting for him to come off the bus and he didn’t,” mother Yasmin Guzman Sanchez said. “So then the bus driver shut the doors and I waved at her. She opened the doors and asked me what I needed. And she and I told her my son, he didn’t get off the bus.”
The driver then checked the bus and said he wasn’t there. The driver suggested that maybe he got off at their only stop before, at the Green Acre mobile home near Dollar General in Benton City.
“Immediately, I thought, he’s wandering the streets,” Guzman Sanchez said. “Someone can take him, harm him, steal him.”
Guzman Sanchez began knocking on doors at the mobile home park with other family members and showing pictures of her kid. No one had seen him. Guzman called the police and began working with the Benton County Sheriff’s Office. A nearby mother also picking up her kid from the bus said she heard a kindergartner was found sleeping on the wrong bus, BCSO quickly confirmed it was Guzman Sanchez’s kid.
“Once he told me he found my son, I started crying. I just started breaking down,” Guzman Sanchez said. “I need to get back together and then go pick up my son.”
Kiona-Benton School District Super Intendent Pete Peterson is proud of how the district’s drivers handled the situation.
“Kindergarteners are smaller kids, and especially if they’re not in the front of the bus where we assign them to be, it’s possible to miss them,” Peterson said. “But our bus driver did exactly what he was supposed to do. He radioed in, said the name of the student, and then found out that the student was being looked for and delivered the student home.”
Peterson says the best way for parents to handle these kinds of situations is to notify the district and school as soon as possible. The sooner the district knows about an incident, the sooner they can help.
“We found and located the student 17 minutes after the first call went out. And so that’s a good turnaround time to ensure that parents never have to go through this, but when they do, we’re going to put as fast a solution on to it as we can,” Peterson said.
Communication is one of the biggest things both Sanchez Guzman and Peterson would like to work on.
“I’m not trying to blame or just put the blame on the teacher or put the blame on the bus driver. We all have to work together because we all have responsibilities,” Guzman Sanchez said.
Peterson says the district gives kindergarteners tags to show bus drivers what grade they are and where they’re supposed to go.
