Driver misses stop for U46 preschooler

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Updated: January 7, 2012 8:10AM

A preschooler was left on a bus for two hours last week before a School District U46 bus driver discovered the boy at the district garage. District officials called the incident “very regrettable,” and the driver is no longer with U46.

The 4-year-old boy had been picked up at 10:45 a.m. Wednesday at the Independence Center for Early Learning in Bartlett, where he attends preschool, U46 spokesman Tony Sanders said.

He was supposed to then be dropped off by the small bus at a daycare center in Streamwood, according to Jeff King, U46 chief operating officer.

Instead, King said, the bus driver — who has 13 years of experience with the Elgin school district — “ran two other runs at that time, then came back to the bus garage.”

“She started to check the bus, heard the student on the bus at the time, pulled back out and took the student to the daycare center.”

Sanders noted the boy never was left on the bus alone.

Reporting the incident to the district would have been “the normal procedure,” King said, but the bus driver “did not do that.”

It also is normal procedure for a bus driver to check the bus for students at the end of each run, Sanders said, but “that apparently did not happen.”

The boy’s mother alerted the school district when she found out he was not dropped off at the daycare center, the spokesman said. By the time U46 transportation officials tracked the boy back to his bus, the driver already was on her way to the daycare, he said.

That driver is no longer with the district, Sanders said.

“We have the procedures in place,” King said. “The driver just didn’t follow any of them. That’s why we released the driver.”