Bus transportation is one of the many areas of special education which causes anxiety for parents of children with special needs. In one instance, my son was dropped off at our old house on the other side of town, when he had been picked up in the morning at our present house. The bus company manager excused this error stating "It is not as if we dropped him off at the wrong house, we simply dropped him off at your old house." Who could argue with such profound illogic like that, especially when we had never lived in the old house during the time our son was receiving special education; how they even got that address remains a mystery.
The more common scenario which I receive several telephone calls throughout the year is "my child fell asleep on the bus, he/she did not come home, and after much panic and confusion I retrieved my child from the bus depot." The next question is usually can I sue for the years taken off my life during the period my child was missing. There is a new system in place on many buses in New York that may make this situation a thing of the past.
The new system involves installing a special alarm on the rear interior door of the bus. The alarm must be disarmed manually when the engine is turned off, or it will emit a very loud sound and the lights will flash. The idea is that in the process of going to the back of the bus to shut off the alarm, it will prompt the bus driver to check for sleeping or slouching children who might otherwise be forgotten or "lost" at the bus depot. I am planning on advocating for installation of this device on buses that transport children with special needs in Illinois. If every bus in the this country had this alarm system, maybe in this instance no child would be left behind.
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