“You must be Madison.”
But it wasn’t Madison.
It was another 6-year-old girl, apparently either too shy or polite to correct the adults who kept calling her Madison when she turned up at the Augustana Early Learning Center on Wednesday afternoon.
That’s where she was mistakenly delivered by bus after her first day of first grade at Carson Elementary School in Denver.
In the hectic first week of a school year, young children are supposed to be carefully shepherded onto the right buses by an adult — a volunteer parent, teacher or principal — in accordance with the individual school’s transportation plan, said Denver Public Schools spokesman Michael Vaughn.
“Each bused kid has an assigned route,” he said.
The bus driver has the list. School staff and other adult supervisors have it. Parents receive the information. At Carson, each bus has an adult supervisor assigned, Vaughn said. Some special-needs students have individual chaperones.
Easy to get confused
On Thursday, the second day at Morey Middle School, boarding the right bus appeared to be challenging, even for the older kids.
Many students ran around, confused, asking for directions from every adult in sight. Many called home on cellphones to ask their mothers, “What’s my bus number again?”
DPS transportation department head Pauline Gervais was on the scene. She visits schools with “lots of buses,” she said, to help teachers, drivers and students sort it out.
“(DPS) buses more than 20,000 kids a year,” Gervais said. “We haven’t lost one yet. We have misplaced a few for a short time.”
At Carson, 65 out of 400 kids board eight DPS buses and some private buses.
Chelsea Byrnes, a teacher in the Cricket classroom at Augustana, said the little girl had been walked over to her group’s bus by an unidentified adult.
“You must be Madison,” Byrnes said to the child. The little girl said nothing but boarded the center’s bus.
“A lovely afternoon”
By all accounts, the lost girl known as “Madison” for the rest of the day didn’t suffer and was supervised during every minute of her misadventure.
“She had a lovely afternoon playing with the other children,” Byrnes said.
Her parents, still unidentified by police or the school district, probably had a different experience.
While the girl played, police checked parks, playgrounds and school bus stops for a lost girl in a pink dress.
“By the end of the afternoon, when she had not been picked up by the correct time (6 p.m.),” Byrnes said, “our afternoon teachers realized that something wasn’t right.”
They called police by 6:45 p.m. Police gave the girl a ride home.
The real Madison — who was a no-show at Augustana — was safely at home the entire time, Byrnes said.
“Everyone needs to be exceptionally careful for the first week or so,” Byrnes said. “Classroom teachers or someone need to know where each child is going.”
Vaughn said that is the plan.
Vaughn said Carson principal Tamara Acevedo has followed up with the girl’s parents and is reviewing the transportation plan with everyone at the school.
“It is being taken very seriously,” he said.
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276 or edraper@denverpost.com
