Not only did this little girl mistakenly take the wrong transportation, but she was also dropped off very far from her home with no one to meet her, WSOC TV reports.
After school ended, A’lana, who’s a student at Nathaniel Alexander Elementary in Charlotte, NC, got on a bus instead of being picked up and driven home by a great-aunt like she was supposed to.
When the great-aunt arrived for the school pickup and couldn’t find her, she learned about the little girl’s whereabouts with the help of the school, and relayed the information by phone to A’lana’s mother Gerria.
The Mother then called the school and was told that the bus would turn around and bring her daughter back.
But instead of her daughter being taken home like the school had assured her, A’lana ended up somewhere else: a neighborhood in northeast Charlotte that’s a whopping 5 miles from where they live.
A’lana’s father Gerald received a phone call from a stranger, and during the call, Gerria said to WSOC-TV she heard “a guy saying, ‘I have a child here. Is this Mr. Foreman? I got her information off of her bag, I just noticed that she was here on the side, standing by herself crying.'” She goes on to say, “She got off the bus with no one there to receive her. And I guess the bus kept on going, because the gentleman found her, standing there crying by herself. Nobody else got off at the stop is what I was told.”
Fortunately, the people who found the little girl contacted the police, who then brought her back to school and comforted her, the Foremans said.
The parents are still understandably distressed about the incident that put their daughter in danger and left her crying on what was supposed to be an exciting day in her life.
“Who’s to answer for that? Why did this happen? Why did the bus driver let her off? Who consented for her to even get on the bus in the first place?” Gerria said. “Just imagine what could have happened to her? She could be on a milk carton now,” said Gerald.
In response to the incident, school officials said that late buses and some other bus issues are typical during the first few weeks of the school year and they will be working to get everything on track.
While lateness is understandable at time, there’s really no excuse for this bus mishap.
For a child that’s only 5-years-old, it’s totally unacceptable to drop off a kid when there’s no one clearly there to pick her up, because a lot of terrible things could happen in such a short amount of time.
Let’s hope that the school’s bus system gets their act together and that the school, in general, handles their approach to drop-offs more responsibly in the future.
This isn’t the first time a child being dropped off in the wrong location has made headlines. Earlier this month, a kindergartner in Tennessee reportedly took a school bus and was dropped off blocks away from his bus stop.