Charlotte school fixes bus stop after investigation

Charlotte school fixes bus stop after WBTV investigation

A charter school in Charlotte has swapped their bus and plans to move a bus stop after a mother called WBTV with safety concerns.

Safety Concerns Raised

Sheri, who asked we keep her last name and her daughter’s name private, contacted Jackson Day School where her kids are students three months ago. She said her daughter had almost been hit by a car at a Huntersville bus stop.

For months, a JDS activity bus with no stop sign or stop bar lights has been picking up children on a Magnolia Walk Drive roundabout. The gray bus pulls up to a different side of the roundabout every morning, Sheri said, and children have to walk across the road through traffic to get to the bus.

“I almost got hit by a car because they were passing through the bus,” Sheri’s daughter said. “Cars just go so fast.”

School’s Response

Sheri told the school all of this in December. In emails reviewed by WBTV, the school’s dean of operations, Tom Winstead, promised he’d work to move the bus stop to a parking lot instead. In another email reviewed by WBTV, a Charlotte Mecklenburg School administrator told Sheri that activity buses were not allowed to pick up students on North Carolina roadways, given their lack of appropriate lights and stop signs.

N.C. laws stipulate that yellow school buses, as opposed to activity buses, are responsible for picking up students on daily routes.

Swift Action

Three months after Sheri contacted the school, however, the school hadn’t resolved the problem. Then Sheri says another one of her children was almost hit again.

“He was crossing the street and he almost got clipped by a car too because they didn’t stop,” Sheri said.

That was when she reached out to WBTV, who attended one of the pickups on Monday morning with Sheri and her children. WBTV reached out to the school later Monday morning and within four hours Winstead responded saying they would swap the activity bus to the appropriate school bus the next day.

Improvements Made

“The school was working with parents to relocate the stop,” Winstead wrote in an email. “A bus with the stop signal will stop there for the next few days until the stop is relocated to a parking lot down the road on Thursday that was already prepared.”

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