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School bus drivers refuse to desert little riders

The county has a policy of not leaving kindergarteners at bus stops where no parent is waiting for them.

By DONNA WINCHESTER
Published October 4, 2005

	[Times photo: Bob Croslin]
	Leola Simmons, a supervisor at the 49th Street bus compound in St. Petersburg, greets two elementary students before taking them inside, where they will wait for their parents to pick them up.

ST. PETERSBURG - Hours after most children his age are home from school, 5-year-old Elgin Drayton is pacing the floor at the 49th Street bus compound.

The North Shore Elementary kindergartener already has rummaged through his backpack several times, asked for a drink of water and colored several pages in a Scooby-Doo coloring book.

Finally, at 5:40 p.m. - nearly two hours after the child arrived - a clerk reaches his mother.

Angela Young is clearly upset when she arrives at the bus compound 10 minutes later. She has little patience for the clerk's explanation that Elgin's bus driver brought him there because no one was at his stop to meet him.

"We stay right across the street," Young said. "He can come home on his own."

Scenes like this play out hundreds of times a year at the south Pinellas bus complex, the nerve center for nearly 200 school bus routes. School officials say there is no formal policy that prohibits drivers from leaving students at stops where no adult is present.

Yet the practice is widespread. Drivers often return young children and those with special needs to their schools or bring them to one of the county's bus compounds.

Hillsborough County actually does have a policy of not leaving kindergarteners at stops without parents. It began last year after four young students were dropped at the wrong bus stops in the first three days of the school year.

Hillsborough bus drivers, who transport more than 90,000 students a day, are instructed to return the children to their schools, all of which have safety teams that are to remain on campus 90 minutes after classes are dismissed to answer phones and locate parents.

In practice, bus drivers also will return older children to their schools, said Hillsborough transportation director Karen Strickland. If children seem worried, bus drivers will not drop them off.

"If we get to a bus stop, any child ... (who is) hesitant to get off, we'll return them to school, whether they're in first grade or high school. If they say, "Where's my mom?' or "My daddy's not here,' something like that will trigger a concern."

In Pinellas, bus compound supervisors call the afterschool duty "daddy day care."

But after a horrific year in which two students were struck by cars and killed after getting off their school buses, Cesar Almodovar, one of several supervisors at the 49th Street compound, calls it common sense.

"Bus drivers are legally labeled as parents in absentia," he said. "They take ownership of the children for the time the kids are on the bus."

In the four years she has been a supervisor at the 49th Street compound, Leola Simmons has entertained hundreds of children who had no one to greet them at their bus stops.

"You get to be mom, doctor, lawyer - the whole nine yards with these kids," said Simmons, a former bus driver who has worked in the district for 21 years. "Sometimes they come in here crying. They don't know what's happening. We have to reassure them that we're not going to hurt them."

By 3 or 4 p.m., the time most children arrive at the compound, they are tired, hungry and want to be home, Simmons said.

She keeps a supply of crayons and coloring books on hand to occupy them.

Employees have brought in toys and stuffed animals.

What's really frustrating, Simmons said, is when transportation workers can't reach a child's parent or guardian. Kids don't always know their phone numbers, she said.

Sometimes, they don't even know their parents' names.

In those cases, employees call the school to get the number listed on the child's clinic card. But if that doesn't work, the supervisors can only hope a parent or guardian will call.

Sometimes it happens and sometimes it doesn't, said Leslie Crisco, who has been a clerk at the 49th Street compound for three years.

"We're kind of in limbo," Crisco said. "There have been times when it gets to be 6 o'clock and the compound is closing and we've had to call the police."

That happened a few weeks ago, said supervisor Kelvin Clark. St. Petersburg police had to take three children who were still at the compound at closing time to a local homeless shelter, where they were staying with their father.

Things can get complicated in an area like St. Petersburg, where homelessness, foster parents and extended families come into play, Clark said.

But the hardest thing for him to deal with is parents who are angry because they have to come to the compound to pick up their children.

"It's like they're in a different zone," Clark said. "You would think they'd be grateful with all the predators in the neighborhoods."

While some children end up at the 49th Street compound once, others are there so often they feel right at home, said bus driver Ava Devaux.

Some kids know where the bathroom is and how to work the remote control for the television in the conference room.

Repeat visits sometimes signal cases of child abuse, supervisors say. Those cases are referred to school officials, who may choose to alert protective service agencies.

Bus driver Broderick King knows what it's like to bring the same children to the compound over and over.

He said he has several children on his route whose parents consistently fail to meet them at the bus stop. He waits as long as he can, and even doubles back to see if the parents have arrived, but he ends up taking at least one of his passengers to the compound every week.

"One mom was picking her child up at 5 o'clock for a while," King said. "I guess she was using the compound like a babysitter service."

Thankfully, Crisco said, not all the parents who come to get their children are angry.

"We had this one mom who had moved and the child didn't know the area," she said. "The parent was caught in traffic. She was elated that we didn't drop her child off in an unfamiliar neighborhood."

Regardless of how parents feel, Simmons, the supervisor, says she sleeps better at night knowing she's doing what she thinks is right for the kids.

"It's a sticky situation," she said. "But you can't let them go when they look around and you know they don't know where they're at."

[Last modified October 4, 2005, 14:28:51]