She waited at the babysitter’s house for the bus to arrive, she said, but when it did Jocelyn wasn’t on board.
“I took off in my car,” Whitmore said. “Ran home as fast as I could.”
Her granddaughter had been dropped off at home instead, she said.
“In the meantime they had radioed the bus and the bus came back to check on her,” she said.
Jocelyn got on the wrong bus because of a miscommunication, Graham Local Schools Superintendent Kirk Koennecke said.
“We had a student…that took their regular bus route home but was supposed to have a permission slip to ride the bus home on another route,” he said. “The bus driver never got that permission slip so the student went home on their regular route.”
She was left alone for less than three minutes, he said.
“I don’t think that the child was in danger,” he said. “However if the child was upset then we’re upset. If the parents were upset then we’re upset.”
When Whitmore arrived home, she said she found her granddaughter crying on the porch. She had walked to a neighbor’s house but they weren’t home.
“She was left here by herself and anything could’ve happened to her,” she said.
A situation like this is rare, Koennecke said, and the school will look into what went wrong.
“We want parents to know that we’re going to investigate issues that come up when they have concerns and that we care about the well-being of all the children,” he said.
The bus driver should have waited to make sure someone was home when she dropped Jocelyn off, Whitmore said.
“This should never be allowed to happen to another child again in our district,” she said.
But there’s no state or school board policy that requires bus drivers wait when a student is dropped off, Koennecke said, although most Graham bus drivers do.
“Our bus drivers try to show that care on a routine basis,” he said.
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