Myeisha Marks, a South Carolina mother, has said that her kid is “very traumatized” after he was allegedly abandoned on a school bus and then delivered off to a stranger before being safely returned to school.
The Horry County mother told People that her son, Shamiar Smith Jr., who is in the process of being diagnosed with autism and used to love the bus, is now terribly anxious.
“He’s like, ‘No, I can’t ride the bus because they’ll give me to a stranger,” she said. “I have to talk to him every day, like, ‘No, they not going to give you to a stranger no more. It’s okay. Mommy’s got you.’ So it’s a lot on me, too.”
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According to Marks, on December 5, she was in Charleston for her birthday party two hours away when her sister called to inform her that her 4-year-old son, Shamiar, had not walked out of the bus.
According to Marks, the bus driver insisted that he scanned the entire vehicle but did not spot her son.
But Marks claimed that once she called Aynor Elementary School, they contacted the bus driver, who allegedly claimed to have discovered Shamiar dozing under a coat before dropping the child off with a neighbor.
Marks stated that she immediately contacted her sister, who had “turned around from going to school,” to confirm with the neighbors.
She subsequently received another “hysterical” call from her sister, reporting that the child hadn’t been there and that the neighbors had not noticed him.
“Oh, God. “My heart dropped in my stomach,” Marks recalled.
When the mother called the school again, they told her that her kid was there. However, when her sister arrived to pick him up, the principal allegedly told her that a “stranger just dropped him off.”
When she approached school administrators for permission to see the bus video, she realized that what the bus driver stated was not true.
“[Shamiar] wasn’t even balled up on the coat. He was laying against the window,” Marks alleged. “His face, everything was exposed.”
In a statement shared with People, a spokesperson for Horry County Schools expressed, “The school and bus office have been in touch with Ms. Marks to discuss the incident in detail and provided an opportunity for Ms. Marks to review the bus video. Procedures from that day are under review and will be addressed appropriately with personnel.”
“Our school bus protocol includes a system of checks and balances to guarantee that each student is accounted for as they arrive at their bus stop,” the spokesperson added. “These steps include, but are not limited to seating charts, the student tag program, and driver interaction with the students. Currently, we are reviewing our tagged child program to determine if any areas of our processes can be refined to improve the safety of the program.”
Marks added that she finally had a meeting with the stranger who had handed her son over to the school.
She expressed gratitude to the woman for assisting her kid with his return to school. “She was like, ‘He was so scared. He was scared to go with me. He was scared about the whole situation,'” Marks noted.
As of December 19, she has yet to receive a response to her complaint, which she sent to the school and bus office. Nevertheless, she said the principal has apologized and promised that it will “never happen again,” and the driver has been removed from that particular bus.
