Grandparent questions protocol after children walk home following bus accident

An El Paso woman wants answers from the El Paso Independent School District after she says her granddaughter and other children walked home after the bus they were riding in got in an accident. She says the children should have never been allowed to leave unsupervised, and believes what happened was a major safety issue.

Tamara White says her 12-year-old granddaughter is a student at Canyon Hills Middle School. She says on the way home from school, the bus got in a minor fender bender near Moonlight and Ankerson off Hondo Pass.

White says her mother was waiting for her granddaughter at the bus stop for over an hour, not knowing where she was.

“They were told there wasn’t another bus coming so they had to walk home or try to call someone,” White said.

White says her granddaughter does not have a cell phone. She says she and other children walked about a mile and a half from where the accident happened to their bus stop near Stonewall and Rutherford.

“That’s when these kids walk up the street, because no one knew where the kids were,” White said. “It was almost 4:30, 5 o’clock.”

White says she was never notified from the school or the district about what happened. She said when she asked the school about the incident on Monday, they directed her to the transportation department.

“They said that they called and left a message on someone’s voice mail Friday afternoon when the accident happened so I walked back into the school and asked them about it,” White said. “Nobody knew anything about the voicemail.”

According to EPISD Spokeswoman Melissa Martinez, the driver did not tell students to walk home. She said another bus was on its way, but as the driver got off the bus to assess the damage, some students decided to get off and leave.

White says regardless, children that age should not have been allowed to leave unsupervised.

“Those kids are El Paso Independent School District’s responsibility until they drop them off at that bus stop,” White said. “If an accident happened, someone should’ve let those kids use a cell phone to call their parents to pick them up so we knew where they were at and what was going on. No courtesy call was made on Monday. Someone dropped the ball somewhere and all I want is for this to not happened again cause if one of those kids got killed it would’ve been a whole different story.”

Martinez says the students should have remained on the bus, as some did, until the relief bus arrived. She says students are only allowed to be released at the scene if a parent arrives to pick them up.

She says the director of transportation has reviewed those procedures with the driver again to make sure that student are kept on the bus unless supervised.

As for notifying parents, Martinez said she was not able to reach the principal of the school, but said it is protocol for a campus to notify parents in those instances.