They also generally don’t have school in freaking July.
This could have happened to me in high school in 1991. Our building was evacuated because a pipe bomb went off in one of the toilets. I was in gym class at the time, and was not allowed to go back in the building for anything–backpack, jacket, and important in my case, street clothes. Problem is, my house keys were in the pocket of my jeans, and here I was with just my gym uniform on a cold, drizzly day. They ferried us onto buses, but since I realized that it would probably be hours until I could get into my house, I got onto a friend’s bus instead and went to her house.
Had I not been old enough to have that foresight… Of course, maybe they would have made some effort to call our parents if we had been younger.
“Drop him off at the nearest corner to my house” is what happened from time to time, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. I knew how to get into my house when my parents weren’t home. I knew how to not die or kill my siblings for the no more than a few hours it would take for them to show up. And if things got really bad, there were several neighbors around; it was a close-knit neighborhood.
For some parents, that might not be the worst idea in the world. (For some it would. If I’d had a kid in the last neighborhood I lived in just dropped off on the corner, I’d be livid.) Are there no latch-key kids anymore?
Well, a responsible latchkey 10 or 11-year-old is one thing, but a 5-year-old like with the OP is another matter entirely. The fact that kindergarteners were sent out with no idea if anyone was around to take the kid in is not a good thing.
Yes there is an option for putting your kids on the bus, but I assume as noted above, if you have a ten year old with his own key and your house is pretty near the bus stop, that could be a perfectly safe and reasonable option.
We had something similar happen, except with much less school-district blame.
My wife and I went on a week-long vacation for our tenth anniversary. Our two daughters (in private kindergarten and public second grade) were staying with my in-laws, “Nana” and “Poppi”. Poppi picked up the younger daughter from her school, then went to our house to wait for my older daughter’s bus. What he didn’t know was that the public school had one of their monthly two-hour-early-release days that day.
The bus driver had let my daughter off the bus because my car was in the driveway. (I think they have the visible-adult-required rule only through first grade.) Apparently, my daughter didn’t remember that we were gone, or didn’t communicate that to the driver. (She’s an obsessive reader, oblivious to anything else when she has a book.) When she found the house locked, she wrote “HELP” and some other things in our driveway with chalk, then sat down on our fence with her book. The mailman noticed either the driveway or her, and took her to a neighbor’s house.
When Poppi got to our house, he saw the pleas in the driveway, but not the note that the mailman had left, so he was panicking and Nana was racing there from work when my other daughter found the note.
They didn’t call us at the time. After everyone calmed down, they took a bunch of pictures and e-mailed them to us in a Powerpoint presentation to tell us what had happened, without us blowing up.
This sort of thing happened to my son on his very first day of kindergarten. He was supposed to be picked up and dropped of at the babysitters house. Around one thirty in the afternoon I got a call from the babysitter that the school had messed up the transportation arrangement.
The bus had come and gone at noon and my son was not on it. She asked the bus driver where he was and she said she did not know. The driver then called dispatch and found out he was dropped off at home. My babysitter was upset and was going to drive over and get him but the driver told her to wait as they were sending a bus to pick him up. At the time I lived in the upstairs of a house. The entrance was an unlocked door downstairs that led to the actual apartment door upstairs. They found him sitting at the top of the stairs crying.
He later told me he went upstairs but could not get in. He went back down and walked to the bar next door that I worked at sometimes on weekends thinking I might be there. When he found out I was not there he went back home and sat at the top of the stairs and talked to our dog Pepper through the door while he cried and then the bus lady called his name and he came down the stairs and she took him to the babysitters house. I was glad he at least decided to go back home and did not wander around even more.
I was upset to say the least. The school blamed it on the transportation department and the transportation department blamed it on the school. The thing that pissed me of the most was I was told that any transportation form that required the child to be dropped off anywhere but at home had to be taken directly to the transporation department which I did. They did apologize but it still had me pretty upset.
They improved things later because when my daughter started school two years later they not only had the pre-made name tags but it included their bus number and pick up and drop off bus stop number. I can only assume my child was not the only one dropped off at the wrong place.