School bus flips onto side in ditch on slippery road Monday afternoon with 13 students on board

But the parent of a seven-year-old student who was on the bus is angry and outraged that no one from the school board contacted her family at the time of the incident, or even afterwards, to say that her daughter had been involved in an accident. And she doubts that the children all escaped injury.

Michelle Wilson of Overton says when she saw pictures of the bus overturned in the ditch her heart leapt into her throat. "When my husband brought me those pictures I thought (our daughter) was in an accident, a real accident," Wilson said Tuesday afternoon. She said the only person from the education system she had heard from was her school's principal who called Tuesday to see if her daughter Sienna was okay.

The school bus was traveling from Pembroke towards Overton, Yarmouth County when the mishap occurred on a curve in the road. “It basically slid across the road and landed on the driver’s side,” says Joe Hazelton, the communications officer for the Tri-County Regional School Board.

Other sources have said that when the driver phoned in the accident to the dispatcher, the bus was only in the ditch and not on its side – that it was only afterwards that the bus flopped onto its side, changing the dynamics of the situation.

The bus was being driven by Roy Goudey. The children on the bus were students of Meadowfields Community School.

The school board’s transportation department quickly adjusted the routes of some other buses and dispatched them to the scene to pick up the children to take them home. The children were evacuated through the rear emergency door of their overturned bus. “As far as I know everything was calm and orderly,” Hazelton said Tuesday morning, going on information the board had been supplied with at the time.

But Wilson says her daughter was far from calm when she spoke to her about the accident. Wilson was at work when her daughter arrived home. "She called me and she was very traumatized. She said she hit her head twice. She flew up in the air, hit the ceiling, came down and hit her head again," says the mother. "She was screaming and then she was crying."

Wilson questions the decision to just load the children onto another bus and take them home. "It should have been standard protocol, (the school board) should have been the ones sending an ambulance to the scene or transporting the kids to the hospital and notifying us."

Wilson isn't the only parent with questions about the accident. Wendy Parker, whose nine-year-old son Matthew Pyne was on the bus, said she received a call from no one about the accident.

On Wednesday she called her son's principal seeking answers. She said the principal wasn't aware Matthew had been on the bus until the student had told him on Wednesday.

The afternoon of the accident, Parker says her son was 35 minutes late coming home from school. She called the school to find out what the problem was and was told there were some buses running late. There was no mention of an accident. The school had not yet been told of one.

It wasn't until her son walked through the door looking pale and saying he needed to throw up that she found out what had occurred.

Her son also complained his leg hurt because other students had fallen on top of him when the bus turned onto its side. "It's very unacceptable the way that it was handled," she says. "When I look at those pictures (of the bus) it just makes me shake."

Contacted Tuesday afternoon, school board Superintendent Phil Landry said he was taking the concerns of parents extremely seriously. He said he had had meetings about the accident with staff and the board's transportation department throughout the day.

Landry says when the accident was reported, the word was that things were under control at the scene and that it appeared no one had been injured, which is why, he said, paramedics were not called, nor were parents. Not even the RCMP was called.

The board does have a policy in place to contact parents if an injury has occurred to a student during the school day.

Landry says after seeing photos of the bus the next day it was obvious this hadn't been a case of a bus just going in the ditch. "When I got the call it was the bus is in the ditch. When I looked this morning at the (photo on the) screen it was more than in the ditch," he said. "I'm looking at the whole process because as a parent, and as a grandparent, how would you feel if you hadn't been contacted and you saw the picture of the bus?" he said. "I can imagine if it were my five-year-old granddaughter."

Landry adds the board and Meadowfields are looking at making someone available to speak to the students who were involved in the accident. "We're looking to see what we can do because yes, they're elementary kids and that was something quite awful for them to experience," he said.

In the meantime, he said, the board will continue to review the situation.

Road conditions were not favourable Monday afternoon. Aside from snow on the road, strong wind and snow squalls were creating whiteout conditions.

Schools had not been cancelled for the day, although in Shelburne County the school board dismissed schools an hour earlier than usual.

Asked why schools in Yarmouth County hadn’t been closed, Hazelton says there is a consultation process that takes place early in the morning involving the school board’s transportation department, the provincial transportation department and Environment Canada. “If school is on for the day, one is to assume that we were advised by the Department of Transportation that road conditions were manageable and Environment Canada would have advised us that there were no severe weather warnings in effect,” says Hazelton, who admits that the weather did deteriorate as yesterday went on.

Schools in Yarmouth, Shelburne and Digby counties were closed on Tuesday.

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