A Long Island mother says her young son was left alone on a school bus for nearly half an hour after the driver failed to drop him off at his stop.
“He was left alone for almost 30 minutes,” Natalie Sellars of Uniondale told Newsday about her son Michael, who was 6 at the time. “What if something had happened to him? What if he had gotten off the bus by himself?”
The incident happened this past June, the day before Michael’s birthday, Newsday and CBS affiliate WCBS reported. Sellars said Michael, then a first grader, boarded a bus operated by Guardian Bus Company with several other students.
Michael was supposed to get off at a bus stop on Greengrove Avenue, where his babysitter was waiting. But according to Sellars, the driver skipped the stop and let off the other children at the next one. Since Michael didn’t know the area, he stayed on the bus.
When her son didn’t arrive home, Sellars called him on his emergency cell phone.
“He goes, ‘Mom, I’m on a bus by myself, and the bus driver and all the kids are gone.’ I said, ‘What?’ ” she told WCBS.
Sellars said Michael showed her the view through a video call. “Thank God he knows how to do that, because me and his dad trained him,” she said. “All I see is the baseball field and I started to freak out. I blacked out. I started crying, and I called 911 right away.”
School officials later tracked down the bus driver’s home address, where Sellars found her son still on the bus. She said she couldn’t understand why he was left behind, since he was sitting upright the whole time.
Sellars also told WCBS she hasn’t received a personal apology from the driver or Guardian, and she has asked for but not received the bus’s dash cam footage from that day.
PEOPLE reached out to Guardian Bus Company for comment. In a statement shared with Newsday and WCBS, the Oceanside-based company said: “We sincerely apologize. We have a zero-tolerance policy for a child left behind. It shouldn’t happen.” The company confirmed the driver has been fired.
Uniondale School District Superintendent Dr. Monique Darrisaw-Akil also released a statement to PEOPLE: “The safety and well-being of students is paramount to the Uniondale School District. In compliance with privacy laws and guidelines, the District cannot discuss the particulars of this case.”
She added, “The District took immediate action to ensure the bus driver in question was removed from all future Uniondale School District bus routes. Additionally, all District protocols and procedures were followed in terms of responding to the child’s and the family’s concerns and needs subsequent to the incident.”
Sellars said that since the incident, Michael — who has asthma and didn’t have his inhaler with him at the time — has refused to ride a school bus and is now in therapy.
“At night, he comes into my bedroom and wants to sleep with me, which he’d stopped doing since he was 3,” she said. “And when he sees a bus, he goes, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to go on that bus.’ He’s too scared to get back on. He’s worried they’ll leave him again.”
