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Imagine sending your non-verbal autistic child off to school on a bus only to get a call hours later that the bus never arrived and the school didn't know where the bus was. According to a city investigation, that is exactly what happened at PS289 in Brooklyn late last year. Education reporter Doug Williams has the details. The arrival window for students who take the bus to PS289 in Crown Heights is 8:20 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. But on December 16th of 2025, six non-verbal autistic students didn't arrive until after lunch at 1:25 p.m. But the students weren't just 4 hours late. They had been missing. Where are they and what's going on?
According to the report by Anastasia Coleman, the special commissioner of investigation for the city school district or SCI, the bus company, Consolidated Transit, was not responsive that morning. The DOE and NYPD had to be contacted. The bus company dispatcher surfaces at 11:45 a.m. saying the driver was lost, but would be at the school in 15 minutes, right around noon. The dispatcher's word, which turned out to be off by an hour and 25 minutes, was all the school had to go off of because the dispatcher had also said the bus's live GPS tracker wasn't working. That was not the case. It was working.
The GPS data was eventually acquired by the DOE and analyzed in the investigation, which also found that the bus driver that day was a fill-in. The matron on the bus, however, had nearly 20 years experience and admitted to investigators that she had made no effort to speak to the driver or contact the school. When they did arrive, according to the investigation, one student quote had urinated on herself and removed her diaper and leggings with her dress still on. This is the problem every year. Tana Jordan's son doesn't go to that school and wasn't on the bus that day. And despite the disturbing details, the story doesn't surprise her. She sits with her son, Ruben, who is physically
and mentally disabled as she explains that he arrives late to school on the bus every day, every single day since the beginning of the school year. That's unacceptable. That violates the law. That violates the protections that are put in place so that my son can get a free and appropriate education. All right. So, a spokesperson for Consolidated Transit says both employees are on administrative leave and are not permitted on their buses or quote have any student interface or interactions. The DOE and investigators say both the driver and matron were suspended immediately. They also now have codes attached to their names that practically and likely bar them from any DOE vendors in the future. Those codes
though would not be visible to outside contractors like private schools for example. Doug, no parent wants to go through this. Any advice on, you know, what something can help? Well, we covered a similar story in Queens in March of this year, and what makes the story similar isn't just the subject matter of not knowing where students are on the bus. It's also that in both cases, at least one parent had an Air Tag in the backpack of their child. And that not only helps everyone stay calm in the moment, even if it's impossible to, but it in this case actually helped investigators.
All right, technology. Thank you, Doug Williams.
