It has emerged that a 4-year-old infant spent the entire school day locked up on a school bus earlier this month. Only after class when the driver was supposed to collect the children for the return journey did he discover the child incarcerated on the vehicle.
The incident happened in Alveringem in West Flanders on 10 October. Mayor Gerard Liefooghe takes up the story: “The children have to be in school by 9AM. But the driver failed to check the school bus properly when he left the children at school at the start of the school day. It was only in the evening that he discovered a girl still on the bus. She told him she still needed to get to school”.
The girl spent seven hours locked up on the bus without anybody noticing her absence. Her absence was noticed in class either.
Fortunately the child doesn’t seem to have suffered any ill effects from her ordeal. When she travelled to school the following day, she pointedly told the driver he had to take her to school today.
The driver feels awful about the whole affair and that very evening visited the parents in tears. The parents won’t be filing a complaint. They realise it was an accident and aren’t reproaching the driver anything.
The mayor, who also doubles as the chair of the organisation running the school transport, says it’s the first time anything has gone wrong in half a century: “It’s been a wake-up call for everybody involved with children. We must all be alert and ensure everything goes perfectly during the next half century”.