A Wake County school bus carrying Middle Creek Elementary students got blocked in by a parent’s car at a Holly Springs roundabout on Tuesday, after a substitute driver missed several scheduled stops on the route. Some children, unable to get off where they expected, opened an emergency exit and climbed out into the street. Holly Springs police responded to the disturbance but filed no charges against the driver or any of the parents involved.
The confrontation unfolded near Scotstowne Lane and Grenoch Valley Lane on Tuesday afternoon, according to the Raleigh News & Observer, which reported that Holly Springs police coordinated with the Wake County Public School System after the disturbance was called in. Police said a WCPSS bus driver apparently missed some bus stops, angering parents who had gathered to pick up their children. The driver was a substitute who was having difficulty navigating the unfamiliar route, and he eventually pulled the bus over safely to the side of the road as the situation escalated.
Parents had been tracking the bus in real time through the district’s free Here Comes the Bus app, according to the News & Observer’s reporting. When the bus began passing designated stops, some parents tried to flag the driver down, and others attempted to pull their own kids off the bus at an undesignated location. One parent ultimately blocked the bus with a car inside a roundabout, according to Holly Springs resident Deborah Bridger, who described the incident in a Facebook post cited by the paper.
A Bus Full of Terrified Kids Spills Into the Street
Bridger, whose account was relayed by the News & Observer, said the driver would not let children off the bus, and that a child eventually opened the emergency exit door. What followed, she said, was chaos: an entire bus of terrified children poured into the street, and the situation became wildly unsafe as kids piled out of the emergency door into the road. Bridger said all the children were ultimately okay, though traumatized by the experience, and she placed blame on both the driver and the parents for how the incident unfolded…