A 5-year-old boy in New Jersey was alone and scared when the school bus dropped him off more than a mile away from home − and his parents say he wasn't even supposed to be on the bus in the first place.
Parents of Eduardo Aguilera want answers from the Weehawken Township School District after their son was allowed to leave Daniel Webster Elementary and told to get on the school bus when he should have been in the "Extended Care" program until they could go and pick him up.
A nanny named Marianne spotted the lost boy alone, crying with no idea how to get home. "I said 'where's your mom, where's your dad?'," Marianne tells News 4.
Eduardo told her he was lost and Marianne looked in his backpack and found his mom's phone number. Patricia Ceballos got the terrifying phone call and Marianne stayed with her son until she was able to pick him up.
"I just want to hug her and kiss her because she's an angel. What she did for us is priceless," Cebellos said.
The Cebellos say they plan to meet with school district officials on Tuesday to go over what she called "negligence."
Weehawken School District Superintendent Eric Crespo said the incident was "unacceptable" and that the district will conduct "a full investigation and will take immediate and firm action to ensure these types of mistakes do not reoccur."
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According to the district's own bus rules and regulations, someone should be waiting for the children at the bus stop when the bus arrives but Eduardo's parents were both at work and he wasn't supposed to be there in the first place.
Cebellos said her son told her that someone told him to get on the bus although he had a sticker on his shirt that indicated he belongs to the Extended Care Program that begins at 2:50 p.m. and ends at 6 p.m.
The program was designed to provide school children in Pre-Kindergarten to Sixth Grade with a supervised safe environment that includes academic and recreational activities, according to the district.
"I feel very upset. I want all the people responsible to be held accountable for it because this is not a mistake. This is unacceptable," she said. "Today was us, but tomorrow it could be your kid."
