Bus Driver Refuses To Let Student Board Bus Because She Did Not Have School ID

No I.D., no ride!

The parent of a Riverside High School freshman contacted ABC-7 after her daughter was denied a bus ride home from school, because she did not have her school I.D.

Teresa Perez said the bus driver knew her daughter was a regular bus rider, but he refused to let her on the bus without her school I.D.

“My daughter lost her I.D. and she didn’t realize it was missing,” said Perez, who was extremely upset that her daughter was kicked off the bus after school on Wednesday by the bus driver. “He goes, ‘Well, you’re not getting on the bus so get off.’ The reason was she didn’t have her I.D. is she lost it. But he knows her! She’s been on that bus since September. He knows exactly who she is.”

Perez said her daughter, who is just 14 years old and did not want ABC-7 to use her name, was left at Riverside High School for almost an hour, nearly two miles from her home on Alameda street.

“What upset me so much is, why didn’t anybody in that school run outside, knowing my daughter was by herself at the front door and say, ‘Hey, come back inside! We’ll figure it out or we’ll give her a ride home.'”

“Just because you know somebody, you don’t change procedures,” said Pat O’Neill, associate superintendent of operations for YISD. “What had happened in this case, to my understanding, is this young lady did not have her I.D. Card. The bus driver told her to go to the office to get a temporary pass and she could ride the second bus home. She never made it to the office.”

O’Neill said students carrying their I.D. is very important.

“If you go to any high school nowadays, because of all the thing that have happened, they’re having kids wear an I.D.,” he said.

“If I don’t put her on the bus and she’s late for school, certainly they call me right away,” Perez said. “But the minute she goes out the door after school, they don’t care where they go.”

O’Neill stressed the district needs to know who is on the bus and whether they are indeed a student.

Perez said her daughter was eventually picked up by her husband and brought home by about 5 p.m.