SAN ANTONIO – The Northside Independent School District is investigating how a second-grader was found wandering along a busy road Monday afternoon after a bus mixup.
A parent found 7-year-old BeShaun Payne alone and walking along an intersection on Potranco Road. They then called police to help find the child’s mother.
BeShaun’s mother, Jacquaye Jacobs, was shocked when she got the phone call from the police.
“That was alarming,” Jacobs said. “Then it trickles out that my son was found at Sonic on a main street, you know -- a semi-truck passing by at 55 miles per hour.”
It was BeShuan’s first day of summer school. The plan was for a school district bus to pick him up and drop him back off, which Jacobs thought was simple.
“I wasn’t worried because there was a precedent set. I just wanted to make sure all my T’s were crossed, and my Is were dotted,” Jacobs said.
But it went wrong from the beginning, she said. The bus didn’t pick up her son from home, so she drove him to Wernli Elementary, where he was taking summer classes. A bus was then supposed to pick him up and take him home after school.
Instead, BeShaun got on the wrong bus, and that bus dropped him off four miles away at Boldt Elementary, the school he attends during the regular school year, according to his mother.
Jacobs said she later found out BeShaun had walked over a mile to the intersection where a parent found him.
“My thought was like, ‘Where’s my son?’ Right. Because 20 minutes later -- I thought he was at the school the whole time, but yeah, he got put into the cop car in a booster seat,” Jacobs said.
Fortunately, BeShaun is OK, but he said he does not want to go to school on Tuesday. Jacobs does not want any other child to experience what her son did.
Northside ISD officials have apologized to Jacobs and are reviewing camera footage to find out how BeShaun slipped through the cracks.