A school bus left a Cheltenham 5-year-old at the wrong stop, alone. His family wants to know why.
“Our 5-year-old son was nowhere to be found,” Isaiah Nelson wrote in a letter sent to Cheltenham officials. “The panic set in immediately.”
Cameron Nelson was looking forward to everything about kindergarten: his teachers, his friends, but most of all, the big yellow school bus that would take him to Cheltenham Elementary School.
“But now when he sees a bus, he says, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to be lost,’ ” said Shaquis Davenport, Cameron’s mom.
Cameron’s bus driver dropped him off at the wrong stop after school Tuesday, leaving the boy, who has autism, alone and terrified. A couple eventually saw Cameron standing by himself, and his frantic parents found their son after they realized he was not on the bus to which he’d been assigned.
Cameron was not injured, but he’s still scared, and his mother can’t sleep. Her son is a chatty boy who thinks everyone is his friend. He might have stepped out into the street and gotten hit by a car with no one to watch him.
“I can’t tell you how livid I am, how frightened I am at this moment,” said Davenport. “We definitely want to make sure this doesn’t happen to another child, another family.”
Davenport and her husband, Isaiah Nelson, opted to drive Cameron to school on Monday, the first day of the year. But Cameron wanted to ride the bus like the big kids, and they thought it would be a good experience for him.
Davenport and Nelson put Cameron on the bus on Tuesday morning and walked together to the bus stop to pick him up after school at the appointed time. When none of the children who stepped off the bus was Cameron, their hearts began to sink, they said.
“Our 5-year-old son was nowhere to be found,” Nelson wrote in a letter sent to Cheltenham officials. “The panic set in immediately.”
Davenport asked the bus driver where her son was and described what he was wearing. The driver asked if Cameron had been on that bus in the morning, and Davenport said he had. The driver told her Cameron must have been put on the wrong bus and would be getting off the next bus that pulled up to the stop.
“She said, ‘It’s the first day, things like this happen,’ ” said Davenport, who knew that Cameron’s teacher had attached a tag to his backpack, and the backpacks of other kids who ride the bus, indicating not just his bus route, but the specific location of his bus stop.
But the kids still on the bus piped up, correcting the driver, telling her that Cameron had been riding with them earlier that afternoon. Davenport realized the driver must have let Cameron off at the wrong stop, and Nelson immediately left on foot to try to find Cameron.
“He was running around the apartment complex, screaming and hollering,” Davenport said. People got out of their cars and asked what was happening. Some helped search for the boy; Nelson flagged down two school buses to see if Cameron was on them.
About 15 minutes after Cameron’s parents met the bus, Nelson found their son, standing with the couple who saw the little boy by himself and got out of their car to make sure he was safe. (The family is profoundly grateful to the couple; they’re not sure Cameron would have been OK without them.)
“My son was crying hysterically, as well as I,” Nelson wrote. “As I was finally able to hold my son in my arms again, he exclaimed, ‘Daddy, I was lost.’ This whole event traumatized me, my wife, Cameron, and his grandparents.”
Nelson and Davenport took their concerns to Cameron’s principal and other Cheltenham School District officials. Most were sympathetic, but the parents said they were taken aback by the response of the director of transportation.
The transportation official told Nelson the bus driver had over 20 children to drop off and said, “It will take time to check every student’s tag,” Nelson said.
Nelson and Davenport were aghast.
“That’s what they’re there for,” Davenport said. “It’s not OK to lose a child.”
Cameron won’t be riding the bus again, his parents say.
“He told me, ‘I thought I was lost forever,’ ” said Davenport.
Brian W. Scriven, Cheltenham’s superintendent, said the district responded “immediately, and with the seriousness it warranted, including notifying and working with our bus contractor, Cheltenham Transportation, and opening an investigation.”
Scriven has “tremendous empathy for the student and their family for what they went through,” he said in a statement. “Student safety is a top priority in our district and we will continue to work to provide a safe, welcoming environment for all of our students.”
An official who answered the phone at Cheltenham Transportation, the private company that operates the district’s buses, declined to comment, and emailed requests for comment were not answered.
Davenport and Nelson said they want assurances what happened to Cameron will not be repeated.
“That driver should not be driving no one’s children,” Davenport said. “That bus company needs to make sure their staff are well-trained. There should be some type of checklist that shows what kids are getting on and off the buses.”