A 6-year-old boy was found crying outside in triple-digit heat last week when he was dropped off at the wrong bus stop in Fort Worth after school.
The boy’s parents arranged for him to be dropped off at Thomas Place Community Center, where his mother, Stephanie Garcia-Chacon, would then pick him up from an after-school program.
However, last Thursday, the school bus dropped the boy off at a bus stop near his apartment complex. He managed to walk to his residence, but no one was home to let him inside.
“A few strangers that lived in the complex as I do, found him crying,” said Garcia-Chacon, NBC 5 DFW reported. “He was pretty upset. He was hot and sweating. … It could’ve turned out so badly. I mean he’s six. Not everyone in this world is nice. And my heart sank thinking of what could’ve happened.”
A Fort Worth ISD spokesperson claimed the district holds itself “to high standards of service.”
“Unfortunately, we did not meet that standard last Thursday. A student was dropped off at home instead of at their after-school program. Because drop-off locations can change for students, we remain vigilant to make sure we are aware of drop-off locations,” the spokesperson said in a statement, according to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
This is not the first such incident in reported in Fort Worth ISD. Last year, multiple school bus drivers allegedly dropped students in the wrong neighborhoods, sometimes as far as half a mile away. As a result, the board of trustees voted to adopt GPS-tracking technology for the district’s bus fleet in September 2023.
Some Fort Worth parents argued that this move did not actually resolve the problem.
“That just tells us where the buses are at or not at,” said district parent Jeff Williams, per the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
“That doesn’t help if they get dropped off in a different neighborhood,” Williams pointed out.
Garcia-Chacon told NBC 5 that the day after her son was dropped off at the wrong location, she found that he had a tag on his backpack indicating his correct drop-off location.
“Have a system in place,” said Garcia-Chacon. “Make sure the school is communicating with the bus driver and they know where they’re going and who’s getting off at what stop.”
In addition to the reported troubles with its transportation operations, Fort Worth ISD has struggled to deliver on student achievement.
Only 32% of Fort Worth ISD students scored at grade level on their STAAR exams during the 2021-2022 school year. This is even lower than Dallas ISD, where 41% of students scored at grade level despite the hard work of the school system’s dedicated educators.
Still, Fort Worth ISD did manage to beat out Dallas ISD in terms of on-time graduation that school year. Almost 86% of Fort Worth ISD’s graduating Class of 2022 earned a diploma in four years. Dallas ISD’s on-time graduation rate that year was 81.1%.
