Fort Worth ISD apologizes after bus driver drops students off in wrong neighborhood
FORT WORTH (CBSDFW.COM) - Transportation staff at Fort Worth ISD sent apologies to parents after a school bus driver dropped off elementary school kids in the wrong neighborhood.
Rather than getting off the bus a few blocks from their homes, kids from Daggett Elementary School were left nearly a half mile away Friday, on the other side of busy Hemphill St. on the city's south side.
Video shared by parents showed students loudly protesting to the driver "This is the wrong stop!"
An adult outside the bus also tried to explain to the driver he was in the wrong place, but he didn't appear to respond.
Isabel Garcia-Arreola said her daughter had a phone and called her but was so emotional her older cousin had to take the phone to try to explain where they were.
Garcia-Arreloa said she ran from her home in the Ryan Place neighborhood, toward the Jennings-May St. Louis neighborhood, getting there in time to see someone trying to help as many as seven kids get across the road.
It was the second day in a row her daughter was dropped in the wrong spot, she said, and the third time in September. After the first mix-up early in the month she talked to district staff and thought it wouldn't happen again.
"If the kids are telling you this is not my bus stop, here is my tag, at what point do you stop and say let me look," she said.
Gloria Williams' two daughters only ride the bus home on Friday afternoons. She said she was wondering why they were so late, only to have them walk through the door crying.
"We told him, we told him, this was not our stop," she recalled her girls saying. "But he told us he didn't care, that he wanted us to get off."
Fort Worth ISD didn't answer questions about what happened, but in a statement wrote that it was conducting an investigation.
"However, we feel this is an isolated incident: the driver was a substitute and is not driving the route," the statement read.
Like many districts, Fort Worth ISD has a shortage of bus drivers and had to adjust routes and assignments to try to meet transportation demands.
Parents said the administration at Daggett was aware of the repeated issues, and were told an assistant principal rode the bus with students Monday to make sure they were dropped off in the right location.