Halifax mother demands answers after school bus drops off young kids 4.5 hours late

A Halifax mother says she was left feeling terrified after her eight-year-old twin daughters were more than 4½ hours late returning home from school on the bus, prompting her to call police amid a lack of communication from school and transportation officials.

Chloe Daigle’s children attend École Mer et Monde in Halifax’s south end and are due to arrive home at their bus stop — roughly five kilometres from the school — around 3:05 p.m. AT daily. 

Daigle said she received an email Monday informing her the bus would be 25 minutes late. Soon after, she received a voicemail message saying the bus would be over an hour late.

She waited patiently at the stop. When the bus did not show up after 4 p.m., she began to worry. 

“It was a terrifying, crazy moment of not knowing where my kids are,” Daigle told CBC Radio’s Information Morning Nova Scotia. 

Daigle said she tried calling the bus company, Autobus Transco, and the school, but was not getting any answers.

Desperate to find her daughters, she called police at 6:20 p.m. The person who answered said she wasn’t the first concerned parent to call about the missing bus.

“Meanwhile, some parents from my kids’ class, they started driving to find the bus,” said Daigle.

About 20 minutes later, a woman from the police department called Daigle back saying they had found the bus, and that police officials had spoken to her kids. They were safe and on their way home.

Daigle said she was waiting at her kids’ regular bus stop when a woman came up to her and told her the bus was parked about a block away. She said she started running and could see her girls standing with a bus driver.

“I was just so happy to hug my girls at the end of this horrible situation,” she said of their reunion around 7:40 p.m., four hours and 35 minutes after their bus was due to arrive.

She said her daughter told her the children were shouting at the driver that they were going the wrong way. One of her daughters told her she was crying because she needed to pee but wasn’t allowed off the bus.

Daigle said the police explained that the original bus driver got lost, and another bus driver had to come take over.

But she never heard directly from Transco or École Mer et Monde during the ordeal, calling the lack of communication “unacceptable” and “unbelievable.”

“I had to call the police to find my kids. That doesn’t make sense,” said Daigle. 

Autobus Transco did not immediately return a request for comment Tuesday.

School board responds

Conseil scolaire acadien provincial (CSAP), Nova Scotia’s Francophone school board, issued an apology on Tuesday, saying it cannot imagine the worry and stress the situation caused.

Michel Collette, head of the school board, wrote that its communication with Transco did not meet its expectations.

Collette said the board would be taking a number of steps to review the situation, including identifying gaps in communication between Transco, CSAP, and the families of École Mer et Monde.

The board said it will also work with Transco to review the emergency communication protocol, inform all CSAP families of this protocol, and also ask Transco to directly contact the families of students that were on the bus to provide feedback on the incident.

The statement did not elaborate on what exactly happened.

Transco is a subsidiary of First Student, which operates more than 900 vehicles in Quebec.

Conseil scolaire acadien provincial announced in May 2022 it had selected the company to provide transportation to and from its schools.

Daigle said she planned to drive her kids to school on Tuesday morning.

“I cannot rely on the bus anymore,” she said.