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Eight Anchorage elementary school students riding the bus home were dropped at the wrong stop one day last month.
The Klatt Elementary students arrived incorrectly at the Dimond Estates stop, a mobile home park where roughly 75% of the school’s students live, some 3.5 miles from the elementary school building, on Dec. 5.
The mistake was the result of a bus driver referencing old routes on the first day the school district merged three bus routes into two, said district chief operating officer Jim Anderson. Three stops were added to the Klatt route, but the driver did not make them before reaching Dimond Estates, according to the district.
Jessica Louwerse, the school’s PTA president who lives in Dimond Estates, said that her daughter brought home a young student who didn’t know where she was or where to go after getting dropped off.
Louwerse called the school, which already had the student’s information pulled up and connected with her mom. The child stayed at Louwerse’s house while Louwerse did a quick drive around the neighborhood, ensuring there weren’t other students lingering nearby. By the time she was back home, the student’s mom had picked her up.
A host of busing issues have ensnared the Anchorage and Matanuska-Susitna school districts since the start of the school year in August. At first, a lack of bus drivers left thousands of riders without transportation to school for more than a month. Dec. 5 was the day the Anchorage school district officially transitioned to full bus service for all students after months of rotating bus service.
But the bus issues didn’t end there. After major snowstorms in mid-December, multiple students were dropped at incorrect stops. And, more recently, one woman’s daughter was left at an incorrect stop this month and spent almost an hour lost in Anchorage.
[Her daughter was dropped off at the wrong bus stop and spent nearly an hour lost in Anchorage]
After the incorrect drop-off at Dimond Estates, Klatt principal Kelsey Deiman-Szymanski said in an email to families that as soon as staff found out what happened, they “went into action” and began reaching out to parents. Parents also let the school know which students were home. Meanwhile, “our Klatt students supported one another by providing phones to students and gathering together to avoid leaving anyone unattended,” she said.
She said that after making sure all students were home, the school reached out to the district and its busing contractor, Reliant Transportation, to make changes before the next day.
“I’m really thrilled with the way that Klatt handled it,” said Louwerse with the Klatt PTA. “From the school administration and office standpoint, and the connectivity that they had with parents so quickly.”
When asked about students getting dropped at incorrect stops for a previous Daily News story, the district said there had been four such instances this school year. That tally didn’t include the eight bus riders at Klatt, because the district administration didn’t know about the incident at the time, according to ASD spokesperson Lisa Miller.
Anderson said what happened at Klatt was not raised to the superintendent’s level because of how swiftly staff resolved it. ”We have incidents of all kinds that happen every day in the schools, and when the schools take care of it very quickly, professionally, to standard, it wouldn’t necessarily generate reports up to the superintendent’s level.”
Anderson, who is new to the chief operating officer role, said he’s intent on resetting bus procedures and looking at lessons learned during previous incidents.
“This is clearly one of my top priorities to jump on now and get corrected,” he said. “I can’t control what happened in the past; I can certainly refocus on the safety and accountability of our staff and students and prevent this.”