Families Shaken After School Bus Takes 4 ½-Hour Trip

Families Shaken After School Bus Takes 4 ½-Hour Trip
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
Published: September 3, 2008
Madinat Koroma was frantic: It was after 9 p.m., more than five hours after the school day had ended at the Achievement First Brownsville charter school, and she was still waiting at the bus stop for her daughter, Victoria Adewale, 5, a kindergartner.

As the bus rambled through Brooklyn, meanwhile, Victoria’s mind was on her parents.

“I was worried about my mother and father, that they were going to miss me,” Victoria, who was one of three children deposited at the school about 9:30 p.m. on Tuesday, said softly on Wednesday afternoon. “I was the last one on the bus.”

It is any parent’s nightmare: The yellow school bus that so many parents rely on to ferry their children to and from school simply does not show up on time — not an hour late, not two hours late, but about five hours late for some.

School officials told parents, in a letter sent home on Wednesday, that they could not reach the bus driver on his cellphone for more than two hours. After several parents, including Ms. Koroma’s husband, Charles Adewale, called the police, the bus driver was finally reached, and ordered to return to the school, where he deposited Victoria and two of her schoolmates. The bus had started out with at least two dozen kindergartners and first-graders.

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