District, bus vendor say communication failed after Feb. 13 bus mix-up that alarmed parents

At a Pottsgrove School District board meeting, Jennifer Hovey, chief operating officer of CMD, described a Feb. 13 evening incident in which students from multiple activity/club buses were loaded onto the same vehicle, producing confusion about passenger rosters, a missing‑student report, and a police‑directed hold of a bus for roughly an hour while drivers and police verified identities and reunited children with parents.

Hovey told the board the sequence began when a Ringing Rocks bus arrived at Lower Pottsgrove Elementary to pick up activity students while one of the district’s Lower Pottsgrove club buses was running late. “The driver’s biggest mistake was not stopping the children from boarding at the time that it happened,” Hovey said, and she described how power outages, poor radio reception in parts of Sanatoga and intermittent contact between dispatch and drivers complicated efforts to identify students and locations.

According to Hovey’s account, the driver and aide initially proceeded, dropping and picking up students while realizing only later that some children on the vehicle were not listed on that bus’s roster. Dispatch and CMD managers spent about an hour trying to locate the bus via radios and the district GPS system; when police became involved they directed the bus into Landis in Sanatoga, where officers and additional district drivers helped confirm names and return students to parents. Hovey said police held the bus for about an hour until the last parent arrived; several students were then allowed to continue to nearby local stops.

Board members and parents at the meeting stressed that the central problem was not the mechanical mistake but the district’s failure to notify families quickly. Parents and speakers said families spent a prolonged period worried about young elementary students’ safety. Several speakers asked whether students had been debriefed or supported afterward; the transcript records parents and board members requesting follow‑up support for affected children.

Hovey described immediate operational changes the vendor put in place after the incident: assigning a company phone at the dispatch radio so dispatchers can send group texts to school administrators and parent groups, instructing drivers to call for immediate manager assistance if a roster or identification issue occurs, and issuing a memo to drivers clarifying procedures for sub drivers and boarding. She said CMD will help prepare printed rosters for emergencies and that the district’s recent approval of upgraded scheduling and communication software will allow families to track buses via an app when it goes live.

District leaders at the meeting urged CMD and district administration to treat “timely communication to parents” as the primary root cause and asked for an update at the next board meeting on specific steps taken to ensure parents are notified quickly in similar events. The board did not vote on any disciplinary or contractual action at the meeting; CMD executives apologized and acknowledged the incident was unacceptable.

What happened, in brief: a substitute or alternate routing situation, a late bus, power and radio interruptions and mistaken boarding combined to put students from more than one route on the same vehicle. Officials said no physical harm occurred to students; the immediate harms the board and parents described were anxiety and loss of immediate contact between caregivers and children.

Officials indicated changes to CMD’s on‑duty procedures and cross‑agency communication protocols—particularly use of group text messages from dispatch and faster escalation to managers—are already in place, and the district said it will report back publicly on progress.