Lost Child Prompts Planned Bus Route Changes
FROM FOR THE RECORD (September 26, 1997): Correction Caption wrong: A 5-year-old boy was incorrectly identified in a photo caption in the Sept. 25 edition of the North Side Voice. His name is Jacob Ziegler.
Students at Indian Trail Elementary School may be getting new bus routes by early October after scheduling mix-ups at the first of the year left at least one child lost.
Indian Trail arranges its bus routes according to grade level. That may change in October with a plan based on neighborhoods, school principal Brad Lundstrom said.
Lundstrom believes the current system, requested by parents 10 years ago, may be causing the confusion. Kindergartners ride with kindergartners, first-graders with first-graders and so on, said Lundstrom, a second-year principal at the school.
“The bus system needs to be more regional,” he said. “What we’ve got now is a system where in the case of one family, three siblings are riding three different buses, and that shouldn’t be happening.”
Cindy Havco’s son Harper, an Indian Trail kindergartner, can’t ride the bus and get to school on time. She started taking him to class after the second day when his bus was 20 minutes late to school.
“The bus he rides also has to pick up and drop-off kindergartners at Westview (Elementary),” Havco said. “The bus dropped off those students and then took him to school.”
While changing routes may curtail tardiness, one parent blames a bus driver for her lost son.
Julie Ziegler said she frantically combed her West Gate Village neighborhood for her son, Jacob Ziegler, when he didn’t arrive home after the second day of school.
Ziegler said she called the school and bus dispatchers before she left home to search for her kindergartner.
“I was just hysterical,” Ziegler said. “I found him five minutes away from home after he had gotten off another bus.”
Kindergartners are given colored tags with their bus number, pick-up and drop-off points on them, according to Al Eirls, a dispatcher with Laidlaw Transit, the bus company contracted by Spokane School District 81.
Kids then pin the tags to their jackets or shirts to let drivers know if they’re on the right bus.
Ziegler said the driver of Jacob’s bus should have realized he was on the wrong bus by looking at his tag.
Laidlaw manager Verna Landy said it’s hard for bus drivers to keep track of all the kids.
“Anytime you’re transporting 7,000 students daily, at least one mishap like that is bound to happen,” Landy said.
She said pickup and delivery of kids this year has been a lot better than in the past.
“We’ve gotten good cooperation from the schools,” Landy said. District 81 allows each individual school to decide how it wants students picked up and dropped off.
Despite the explanation and plans to change the routes at Indian Trail Elementary, Ziegler said she will continue to pick up and drop off her child.
“It may have been just an innocent mix-up,” Ziegler said, “but the fact of the matter is that it involved my son.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo