There’s a certain expectation that when you put your kids on the bus in the morning, they will come back home safe and sound.
But for one mom, it almost seemed like her worst nightmare was coming true when the bus her special needs son was supposed to be riding on went missing.
Shannon Hetherington found out the hard way that there is something seriously wrong with the school bus system in Lynn, Massachusettes when her son, Rory, wasn’t dropped off at the usual time.
“He’s usually home at 2:45 and they say give 10 minutes leeway,” Shannon told CBS Boston.
But that 10 minutes then dragged into 2 very long hours, and she thought the worst had happened when Rory didn’t show up at the end of the school day.
It was Rory’s first day of school, which already made the situation stressful enough.
Shannon started to get paranoid and called everyone she could think of to get answers.
“After a second phone call to the bus company with no one answering, I started panicking,” she said.
She called the bus company, but they didn’t answer, and neither did the transportation department at Pickering Middle School, where Rory attends 7th grade. The superintendent of Lynn Public Schools and City Hall didn’t pick up the phone, either.
For all intents and purposes, it appeared that her 12-year-old son, who has autism, had effectively vanished from the face of the earth.
On Facebook, Shannon wrote: “My father went directly to the school to look for him and the school was completely empty. It is appalling to me that the entire staff felt that it was OK for them to go home at the end of the day before our children are home safe.”
At that point she was scared out of her wits and out of options, so she called the police and filed a missing person’s report.
The police department couldn’t get a hold of anyone either, so they had to physically walk into the bus company’s headquarters to find out where her son was.
It turns out that Rory’s bus was full, so he had to take another one home.
And that lead to some confusion because there were kids on that bus who weren’t part of the driver’s regular route. They didn’t know where Rory was supposed to be dropped off, which caused some delays.
Shannon says she understands that sometimes it can take a while to get from one side of town to the other, especially when traffic gets congested during the busier times of the day.
Still, the city of Lynn is comparatively small, with a land size of only 10.47 square miles. That’s hardly any excuse to get lost or be 2 hours late.
But, it was the lack of communication that made her absolutely livid!
“It was the most uncontrollable feeling,” Shannon said. “I felt completely powerless.”
Shannon doesn’t want any parent to go through what she experienced and is demanding better communication between the school, the transportation company, and the parents.
Rory wasn’t too happy about what he went through either, and didn’t want to get back on the school bus the next day.
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