Five-year-old Mia was supposed to ride her school bus almost to the end of the route Tuesday, where her dad was waiting for her in Rock Springs.
Instead, she got off near the beginning.
The bus drove away.
Her mother, Alyssa Boyer, didn't know any of that yet. She was at work in Green River when her phone rang.
It was a friend.
“Hey, where are you?” the friend asked.
“I'm in Green River.”
“I see your kid wandering behind the strip club in Rock Springs with her backpack on,” the friend told her.
“What?”
“Yeah, your little girl is walking around behind the strip club. She looks lost.”
Boyer knew immediately something was very wrong.
“She's definitely lost,” she remembers telling her friend. “Can you please stop and grab her and put her in your car?”
Seven Stops Too Soon
This is Mia's first year riding the bus, and her parents normally walk her to and from her stop.
On Tuesday, Aug. 25, her father was there waiting for her, but Mia wasn't on the bus.
Boyer had tried to prepare her daughter for riding the bus. Her parents taught her to look for the large green street sign near home. She knows their phone numbers reasonably well, Boyer said, and the numbers are also tucked inside her backpack.
Boyer said Mia's assigned stop is only about a half-mile from where she actually got off, but in terms of the bus route, it was nowhere close.
“She got off at like the first one or the second one, and she's supposed to get off around the seventh or eighth stop,” Boyer told Cowboy State Daily.
She said neither the bus driver nor Sweetwater County School District No. 1 contacted the family to say Mia was missing from the bus.
“Not until I called them,” Boyer said.
Boyer said district officials later told her the driver was new.
She doesn't want the driver fired. What she wants, she said, is accountability — and enough safeguards around a new driver, a new kindergartner and a new school year that one mistake doesn't leave a 5-year-old walking alone down the street.
District Responds
After Boyer filed a formal complaint, Sweetwater County School District No. 1 Transportation Director Beau Businelle called her.
Boyer said the conversation changed her impression of how seriously the district was taking what happened.
Businelle told Cowboy State Daily that he and Boyer “had a good conversation” and were able to connect over not only what happened to Mia, but the larger problem of safely transporting children.
“We were able to really resonate with each other about the matter and how this is also above and beyond a concern in our nation,” Businelle said.
The district did not disclose whether the driver faced disciplinary or other personnel action after the incident.
Businelle instead outlined changes the Transportation Department has already been making, including revamped training for both new and experienced employees.
“Our training has been reconditioned in the past year and response actions are in place to aid in new training styles, refreshers, and coaching for all staff members, new and experienced,” he said.
He said the district has also been working on new technology intended to make its buses safer.
Chief among those changes is SMART tag, software the district has purchased and begun implementing to track student ridership.
Businelle said the system was designed by special-needs drivers and route coordinators to provide more accurate information about students getting on and off buses.
“It would give our drivers the confidence of loading and unloading,” he said, while also providing parents an app so they can know what is happening as their children are transported.
But technology coming later doesn't answer the more immediate question raised by what happened to Mia: What keeps another little kid from getting off at the wrong stop tomorrow?
Businelle said his department operates with what he called a “what can we do for the now attitude.”
“We aren't just waiting patiently for that vision to come to fruition,” he said. “We pivot constantly and adjust to the now.”
What Went Wrong?
That's the question Boyer wants answered.
She doesn't expect a school bus driver to memorize where every child lives. She understands there can be dozens of kids aboard and one adult behind the wheel.
But Mia was 5, new to riding the bus and got off several stops before the place where her father was waiting.
After Boyer filed her complaint, Sweetwater County School District No. 1 Transportation Director Beau Businelle called her.
Boyer said the conversation changed her impression of how seriously the district was taking what happened.
Businelle told Cowboy State Daily that he and Boyer “had a good conversation” and were able to connect over not only what happened to Mia, but the larger problem of safely transporting children.
“We were able to really resonate with each other about the matter and how this is also above and beyond a concern in our nation,” Businelle said.
He said the district has already been working on new training and technology intended to make its buses safer.
Chief among those changes is SMART tag, software the district has purchased and begun implementing to track student ridership.
“It would give our drivers the confidence of loading and unloading,” he said, while also providing parents an app so they can know what is happening as their children are transported.~~
‘A Man Followed Me’
While the adults were beginning to sort out what went wrong, Mia was processing an entirely different part of the afternoon.
At first, Mia seemed OK.
Then bedtime came.
“I'm scared to go to school because a man followed me,” Boyer recalled Mia saying.
Boyer asked what she meant.
“A man with bags was following me when I got off at the wrong stop, and it scared me really bad,” Mia told her. “And I don't want to go to school because what if that man is there?”
Boyer said there is no indication the man actually intended to follow Mia. He was carrying bags and may simply have been walking in the same direction.
But Mia was 5, alone and somewhere she wasn't supposed to be.
“She just felt scared because she had no one to turn to,” Boyer said, “and the bus had already left.”
Mia had been wandering in the area behind the Astro Lounge.
Boyer said she later checked Wyoming's sex offender registry and found roughly a dozen registered offenders in the surrounding area.
That only compounded what Boyer had already begun imagining could have happened during the minutes her daughter was alone.
For Boyer, though, the question isn't whether something terrible happened Tuesday; it's how easily something could have.
“That road is busy after school,” she wrote in a formal complaint about the incident. “She could have been hit by a car or taken.”
‘We Didn't Let Them Off’
When former school bus driver Sue Been read about what happened to Mia, one detail immediately bothered her.
The bus left.
Been once drove a school bus about an hour south of Chicago, carrying everyone from pre-K children to high school seniors.
Her district had a simple rule for little kids, she said.
If Been reached a young child's stop and didn't recognize the adult waiting there, “We didn't let them off the bus.”
The child would sit in the seat behind her until Been finished the route. Then she'd drive back to the school and hand the child over to a teacher while staff contacted the parents.
Even if someone appeared at the stop claiming they were supposed to take the child, Been said, that wasn't enough.
“If a man — say little Annie, 6 years old — said, ‘My mom's not here,’ and a guy says, ‘Oh, I'm supposed to take her home.’ No, no way,” Been said. “She would not get off that bus. She would stay with me, and that'd be it. Sorry, buddy. Meet me at the school.”
Been said the principle ought to be universal.
“They can't just drop a kid off and go,” she said.
'Somebody's Babies'
Boyer isn't asking the district to promise that no mistake will ever happen again.
Boyer isn't asking the district to promise that no mistake will ever happen again. And despite what happened to her daughter, she isn't calling for a new driver's job.
She wants the district to figure out how the mistake happened, hold people accountable and put another layer of protection between a mistake and a missing child.
“We, as many other parents, assume when our child gets on that bus and until they reach home they are with safe and trusted adults looking out for them,” Boyer said.
Boyer has now filed a formal complaint.
She wants more safeguards for elementary-age children and, at minimum, another set of eyes on buses during those chaotic first weeks of school when drivers are learning children and children are learning where to get off.
Been said the responsibility can feel enormous from behind the wheel.
“You've got somebody's babies on that bus,” she said. “You've got to take care of them.”
For Boyer, the reason is no longer hypothetical.
Kolby Fedore can be reached at kolby@cowboystatedaily.com.
