KINGSVILLE, Texas — A Kingsville mother experienced every parent's worst nightmare when her nonverbal 5-year-old son was mistakenly placed on the wrong school bus and went missing for hours.
Kimberlee Gonzalez went to pick up her children from Jesus R. Perez Elementary on Thursday, but her son Zayden was nowhere to be found after school dismissal.
"I was very heartbroken. I was terrified," Gonzalez said.
School staff immediately began searching the campus for the missing child but found nothing.
"They started looking for him inside the school, all over campus, and came back out and said he was nowhere to be found," Gonzales said.
After the school searched, Zayden’s parents called Kingsville Police to assist in the search. Officers reviewed surveillance video and discovered that Zayden had been placed on a bus by mistake. Police searched the area, stopping buses around town, and finally found him on a bus near Gillett Intermediate School hours after school had ended.
Gonzalez said the situation was particularly concerning because Zayden is nonverbal, making him unable to communicate his location or ask for help.
"He doesn't talk, imagine if he would have got dropped off somewhere. Something would have happened to him. Somebody, I mean, he could have got ran over. Like, nowadays, there's a lot of things that could happen," Gonzalez said.
According to Gonzalez, the assistant principal at Perez Elementary told her that a substitute teacher mixed up names, mistakenly thinking Zayden was a bus rider rather than a car rider.
"Like to know that him being at school under their care. How can they lose a child?" Gonzalez said.
In a statement to KRIS 6, Kingsville ISD Superintendent Dr. Luz Martinez acknowledged that this is not the first transportation-related incident involving a student this school year. She called Zayden's incident "deeply concerning and should not have happened."
"The safety of every student is our highest priority, and any lapse in our transportation procedures requires immediate action on our part," Martinez said.
Martinez also said that the staff had a discussion following the incident, and said the district plans to implement several changes.
“To immediately address this situation, we met with all principals and transportation staff to review expectations and reinforce safety procedures. In addition, employee discipline has been administered where appropriate. We will continue deploying Central Office staff to support dismissal procedures at all elementary schools and will collaborate with campus principals and transportation staff to streamline dismissal procedures," she said in the statement.
Safety protocols the district will include from now on are reviewing and reinforcing safety and boarding procedures, implementing a sibling buddy system, establishing a stricter check-in/check-out protocol, reinforcing the use of student bus badges for accurate identification, and implementing a bus seating chart.
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