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7-year-old left at wrong stop

The bus driver was counseled for handing the girl over to someone without parental permission, rather than taking her back to school.

SPRING HILL - Kara Groom could imagine only the worst.

The first day of school had ended, and no one seemed to know where her 7-year-old daughter, McKenna Smith, had gone.

Groom's mother, Mary Kay Batts, went to pick up the 40-pound second-grader from the YMCA after-school program at Deltona Elementary School. But the bus from Chocachatti Elementary, which McKenna attends, had arrived without her.

Calls to Chocachatti and the school district transportation department went directly to voice mail. Hernando County sheriff's deputies were ready to launch a search. Groom and Batts grew frantic.

"In the meantime, a friend of mine called me and said, "I have McKenna,' " Groom said.

Day care owner Christy Jobmann had picked up McKenna at J.D. Floyd Elementary School, about 61/2 miles from her intended destination. The girl's teacher had put her on the wrong bus.

Crisis averted. But an underlying problem remained: The bus driver, whose name was not available, never asked Jobmann for any identification or information. He just let the little girl go.

And that, school district officials say, is against the rules. If a child is on the wrong bus, the driver is supposed to take the child back to the school where he or she boarded.

Deviations from a regular bus stop should come with the written permission of a parent only.

"Bus drivers don't have the option where to drop kids off," School Board chairwoman Sandra Nicholson said. "They need to know that."

Nicholson planned to ask superintendent Wendy Tellone to send a memo to all bus drivers reminding them of their responsibilities.

Transportation director Linda Fultz said the bus driver told her he intended to take McKenna back to Chocachatti, but she seemed to know Jobmann and was comfortable going with her.

The driver has been counseled, Fultz said, and "we do talk to the drivers all the time and tell them to be vigilant."

The district will continue to look for ways to prevent children from getting off at the wrong stop, she said, noting that some districts give students cards that can be scanned on the bus to make sure they are in the right place.

As for the bus driver, Fultz said, "He made a poor judgment call, and he knows that now."

Groom welcomed the news that some good might come from her harrowing afternoon, which began about 4:10 p.m. Aug. 9.

Batts was running a late to spend the afternoon with McKenna while Groom attended college classes. She went into Deltona, showed her identification and said she was there to pick up her granddaughter.

"They said, "She's not here,' " Batts recalled. "The lady had just met the kids 10 minutes before I got there. She said McKenna didn't get off that bus. My heart just fell."

A round of calls made it clear the freckle-faced girl with dark hair and sparkling blue eyes was not at Deltona. Batts reached Groom on her cell phone with the news.

Groom immediately called the Sheriff's Office. Ugly thoughts, meanwhile, raced through her head.

Was McKenna left at the bus stop where she got on the bus in the morning, at Hearth Road and Lamson Avenue, a block from busy Mariner Boulevard? Had a stranger abducted her "little raisin?"

A deputy asked for McKenna's height and weight, and if a recent photo was available.

"I, of course, became hysterical," Groom said.

Jobmann was at J.D. Floyd picking up children for day care, as she usually does during the school year. She noticed a bus had pulled in late and looked inside to check for any pickups.

She saw McKenna.

"I was saying, "Hi, McKenna. How are you doing?' I knew she was going to Chocachatti. I didn't know she was going to be on that bus," Jobmann said.

The girl told Jobmann she was supposed to be at Deltona, just like last year. The bus driver said he didn't know where McKenna was supposed to be, Jobmann said, but he was at the end of the line and needed to return the bus.

"I didn't want her to be scared. So I said, "Would you like me to take her? She used to come to my day care,' " Jobmann said. "He said, "Yeah, that's fine.' He didn't ID me or anything. . . . He's never seen me before."

So she took McKenna back to her day care, Mrs. B's on Spring Hill Drive, and called Groom.

Groom was relieved to hear that her daughter was okay, after nearly an hour of consuming fear. That outcome, however, did not alleviate her concerns about the might-have-beens.

"Don't you think every pedophile knows when the first day of school was?" she asked. "Abductions take place at school bus stops."

And the trusting, outgoing McKenna just might be the type to believe someone who says he knows her mother, both Groom and Jobmann said.

The school district must take care, Groom said, that no other family endures such a situation. Batts was grateful a friend, and not a creep, met her granddaughter when she arrived at the wrong place on the wrong bus.

"If it hadn't been for Miss Christy," she said, "I don't know what would have happened."