It’s an image that would make any parent crazy. Sammy was sobbing, lost near dark in the bitter cold. He crossed at least one street. Strangers passed the inconsolable child and didn’t stop; then one decent soul did. The woman who found Sammy called Smith (the boy had memorized her number) and brought him to her.
“It really, really traumatizes me to think of all the things that could have happened to Sammy out there,’’ a still-shaken Smith said in an interview this week. “I watch the news. Every week a kid is missing or dead or raped.’’
Faced with this unthinkable failure, the Boston school district’s response was appalling. Smith’s repeated phone calls to school officials went unanswered. Not until she told her tale at a parent council meeting nearly a week later did she hear from a school district official.
School officials should have thrown themselves at Smith’s feet right away. The superintendent and the city’s detail-obsessed mayor should have been at her door apologizing, and promising big changes so that this would never happen again.
Superintendent Carol Johnson knows her department failed here. “This was not an acceptable response,’’ she said yesterday. She finally called Sammy’s parents herself Tuesday night.
The driver who let Sammy off the bus was suspended briefly, reassigned to a different route, and given a two-hour retraining session. This was also a woefully inadequate response. Because what happened to Sammy wasn’t an isolated incident.
One morning in December, a first-grader at the Higginson-Lewis School in Roxbury was dropped off in the wrong location, three blocks from his school. There were no other students or buses there, but the driver still drove off, leaving the 6-year-old alone. Here, again, the child was lucky: The building houses school district food services, and workers found the child and called his school.
If this has happened twice in the space of two months, you can bet other small kids have been similarly left to fend for themselves.
