Concerned parents in a quiet Connecticut suburb are stepping in after school bus drivers are leaving students stranded in unusual areas of the county.
Families of students in New Britain are finding themselves in a distressing situation, constantly monitoring their children with iPhone trackers and Apple Airtags to ensure they aren’t dropped off in neighboring counties by the bus company.
The company took over transportation services for CSDNB this past June.
One parent, Summers McCray, had to track down her autistic son after he was mistakenly taken to a different county. Her son was supposed to leave school at 3:30 PM last Friday, but hours went by without any sign of him.
When she reached out to the bus company, they informed her that they had lost the GPS tracking for her son’s bus.
She quickly checked her son’s iPhone location, feeling a mix of frustration and anxiety. “I told the dispatcher, ‘No, he’s not,’ and ‘Yes, he is. I don’t know what’s happening,” she recalled.
McCray worked with local police and school districts to organize a pickup for her son at a 7-Eleven in Southington, which is about 10 miles from New Britain.
By then, her son was exhausted and scared, suffering from a headache that, she said, was “only from the trip.”
Another parent, Lily Reyes, shared a similar experience when her nonverbal son, who uses a wheelchair, was mistakenly dropped off at the wrong school. The dispatch hadn’t provided the correct paperwork, leading the driver to search for the school online, which ended with him delivering her son to Plainville instead. He didn’t arrive at the right school until 10:45 AM.
This ordeal led to heightened anxiety for Reyes’s son, who has since become “dysregulated” and has been acting out around peers and family.
In response, Dr. Tony Gasper, a supervisor for CSDNB, acknowledged that the bus drivers and company weren’t prepared as the school year began.
The bus company has promised to take steps to improve services, including hiring additional out-of-state drivers to fill roles. However, the district is contemplating imposing financial penalties on the company for these recurring issues.
Neither the bus company nor the district responded immediately to requests for comments.
