“She asked him what was wrong, and he said he was lost,’’ Smith says the stranger told her. “He said he was trying to find his way home, but he didn’t know where home was.’’
Smith said her concern about the episode grew when her repeated phone calls to transportation officials, beginning that night, went unreturned.
“I wanted someone to take responsibility, to tell me exactly what happened, what the policy is, and what’s in place to make sure it doesn’t happen again,’’ said Smith, a mental health counselor.
The incident, confirmed by a School Department spokesman, occurred Jan. 4, on students’ first day back at school after Christmas vacation, and followed months of frustration over tardy bus arrivals at Boston public schools. In December, the school system fined its transportation provider $800,000 for late bus arrivals last fall. The bus company, First Student Inc., is under contract to deliver more than 30,000 students to and from school on 600 buses.
Smith says it wasn’t until she voiced her frustration at a parent council meeting nearly a week later, on Jan. 10, that she received a call back. A parent who attended the meeting e-mailed a Globe reporter about the incident and made school officials aware that she had done so.
A day or two later, Smith says, she received a voicemail from Michael Hughes, transportation director for the Boston public schools, saying that her son’s bus driver would be disciplined, and promising to call her back. That call never came, Smith says, though she left two more messages.
On Thursday - a month after her son was left to wander city streets alone, and days after a reporter began asking school officials about the incident - Smith finally received another call from Hughes, and heard, for the first time, an apology and an explanation of what happened.
A spokesman for the school system, Matthew Wilder, called the driver’s error and the delayed response from officials “an unacceptable situation.’’
