I didn’t want to read the story of the 19-year old special education student with non-verbal autism in Whittier, CA, who was found dead on a school bus on September 11 in the middle of a scorching heat wave. I didn’t want to watch the TV clips that appeared in my Facebook feed, saying the student, Hun Joon “Paul” Lee, may have been on the bus all day long, and that the substitute bus driver somehow failed to notice that although Paul got on the 24-seat school bus in the morning from his home, he never got out of the bus at school. And to make it even worse, Lee’s sister told the Whittier News that only “Three kids got on the bus and two got out.”
In fact, no one seemed to notice Paul’s absence until his frantic mother called the school Friday afternoon after he didn’t return on schedule. Only then did the bus drivers find Paul’s body in the back of the bus in the parking lot of the Whittier Union High School District. Paul was a student at the Sierra Education Center’s transitional program, located adjacent to that parking lot. According to USA Today, when the paramedics arrived at 4:23 pm that afternoon, they found “several bus drivers attempting to resuscitate the unresponsive man. He was pronounced dead minutes later.” A police investigation is underway.
As a parent of a young adult with significant developmental and disabilities, hearing this story is like a being socked hard in the stomach. It just takes my breath away to think that no one, not the bus driver, not the teacher, not the other staff members, bothered to figure out that Paul was missing for the entire school day. Did anyone notice if Lee banged on the windows for help? Was he invisible because of his developmental disability?
This story drives home the biggest fears so many of us parents share—that no one else but the family truly cares about their teen or young adult with special needs, and that we must be in a constant state of vigilance to protect our children, no matter what their chronological age.
Our son sometimes takes the bus home from his local LAUSD high school, accompanied by an aide, along with a very nice bus driver, and most of the time, that experience is just fine, even fun for him. But, we have had our share of school bus failures, such as when Danny was 9, and had we moved over the summer. I informed the school of our new home address, yet on the first day of school, they still drove him to our old address, and refused to drive him to our new address, saying that instead, they were driving him back to the school. I threatened to call the police and report a kidnapping if the bus driver didn’t stop wherever he was at that moment.
A few minutes later I met the bus driver and my son in a pawnshop parking lot, and we kept him off the bus for that entire school year.
My thoughts keep turning to Lee’s parents and family in this time of mourning and sadness, and I can only hope that a spark of something good will come out of this tragedy.The company that oversees the Whittier school bus system, Pupil Transportation Cooperative (PTC), has announced a number of changes in transporting special education students:
1) A new team checking system to have at least two people confirm that buses are clear of students before they are placed out of service.
2) Bringing in an expert advisor to confirm that PTC is maintaining the highest standards.
3) Identifying and securing an electronic system that will be installed in all buses to check for the presence of a student.
While I welcome these changes, the problem here is more basic: how can we parents be assured that school staff and other professionals really care for our children in the same way they would for their own children or grandchildren? Our kids with disabilities are not second-class human beings. They are part of our family and our community, and they count.
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