COPLEY, Ohio — A frightening situation for a Summit County family after their 6-year-old son was left alone on a school bus, waking up inside a bus garage long after school had already started.
The incident happened on March 12 during a morning route in the Copley-Fairlawn City School District.
According to the district, a substitute driver working through a third-party company, Community Bus Service, failed to complete required safety checks at the end of the route. Those checks are required by Ohio law and include walking to the back of the bus to look for sleeping children and scanning safety sensors installed on the vehicle.
Since those steps were not followed, the child was left behind on the bus. Copley-Fairlawn City Schools confirmed that the driver was terminated immediately.
The boy’s mother, Kristina Galik, says her son woke up alone inside the parked bus in the district’s garage.
“He informed me that he had woken up on the bus, walked off the bus, and then walked around inside the garage and had not seen anyone,” Galik said. “He said that he needed to get to school, so he started walking down the street.”
Eventually, the child approached a worker for help.
“He said that he saw a man taking out the garbage and asked him for a ride to Arrowhead,” Galik said. “I assume this was a maintenance worker, and that’s when he got the ride to school.”
Galik says what’s most troubling is the amount of time her son was unaccounted for.
She said school starts shortly after 9 a.m., but she says she wasn’t notified until 9:40 a.m. that her son was missing.
“So, there is that good window of time where he is unaccounted for,” she said. “I don’t know where my kid was, I don’t know what he was doing, if he talked with anyone else."
District leaders say all drivers are required to physically check each seat after every route and to scan the safety sensors at the back of the bus, both in the morning and in the afternoon.
The district also says it is now providing additional safety training to all drivers and reviewing procedures moving forward.
The Galik family says they have formally requested video footage from the bus garage and a detailed explanation of how the situation happened.
“What if he walked up to someone that wasn’t working with the school district? What if he got lost?” Galik said. “There are so many possibilities of things that could have happened, and it needs to never happen again.”
The district says families with transportation concerns can contact the Interim Transportation Director, Amanda Anders, at 330-664-4874.
