‘My soul left my body’: Parents left to panic after school bus dropped Calgary kids off at wrong spot

A group of Calgary parents are looking for answers after their kids’ school bus went missing earlier this week — with their kids in tow.

It’s not unusual for a group of Valley View elementary students in southeast Calgary to be dropped off or picked up late, but Tuesday wasn’t a typical case of a late school bus.

Madiha Fahim tells CityNews she was waiting at the normal bus stop with about 25 other very confused and frantic parents at the end of the day Tuesday.

That’s when she called First Student transportation, the bus provider, to see what was going on.

“Dispatch is telling me the kids have been dropped off, and I’m like ‘no they haven’t,'” she says. “The dispatch guy got really confused.”

She says the dispatch person put her on hold and then came back on the phone and told her the group of kids between the ages of five and 10 were dropped off at the wrong location.

The dispatcher told her he was trying to get in touch with the bus driver to go back and get the kids.

“I was like ‘what do you mean?'” she says. “My soul left my body.”

Fahim says parents of children as young as five were checking apps and airtags to try and locate their missing kids, only to discover they had been dropped off at a busy intersection near a retail plaza far from the usual spot.

“It’s a huge traffic circle in Saddle Ridge, it’s very big and very busy,” says Fahim.

She used the last known location from her son’s airtag to go find the kids. When she arrived at the wrong location she says kids were crying and running around looking for their parents.

“(The kids) were looking for an adult at that point,” she says, adding it took her over 30 minutes to find her son.

CityNews reached out to the Calgary Board of Education (CBE) who confirm there was an incident this week where a bus load of kids were dropped off at the wrong spot. The board says they have addressed the issue with the First Student transportation.

The bus company has since issued an apology to the affected families in the form of a written statement, saying they’ve addressed the situation with the dispatch team and driver and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.

“We are also sharing the learnings from this incident with all of our drivers, so this does not happen on any CBE runs,” reads the First Student statement.