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Mom wants changes after bus snafu left 6-year-old alone outside a locked home for hours

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Melissa Shaw, and her daughter, Aerianna, all smiles before what would become a traumatic first day for the youngster. (Courtesy photo)

ROCHESTER - A Rochester mom is pressing for changes to school policy in the wake of a bus snafu that had her six-year-old daughter's first day of school spiral from a day full of hope and discovery to an afternoon of misery and despair.

Melissa Shaw said her daughter, Aerianna, who just turned six on Aug. 27, was supposed to be taken from the William Allen School to the Strafford YMCA for an afterschool program the parents had signed up and completed paperwork for.

However, Shaw said that when paperwork the Y bus driver gave to school personnel differed with school records, William Allen School Principal Lynn Allen made a spot decision and opted to put Aerianna on her home bus route.

The result was the youngster was let off at an empty, locked house on Old Dover Road where she sat on the steps and cried herself to sleep, her mother said today.

Meanwhile, Aerianna's father, Shaun Lavallee, not knowing anything was wrong, arrived at the YMCA at 3:30 p.m. to pick up his daughter only to find she wasn't there. Shaw said he was advised to wait to see if she came in on any other buses, but when his daughter didn't come in on the last bus at 4:45, Lavallee became extremely concerned and asked his father - Aerianna's grandfather - to go to the elementary school to see if she was still there while Lavallee tried to sort things out at the Y.
Eventually, Shaw, who was at work and knew nothing about the chaotic situation, was called by the school to verify that the grandfather could be given information on her daughter's whereabouts.

"Well how about you release info to me," she recalled saying in an email to The Lebanon Voice regarding the harrowing experience. "I'm at work and this is the first I'm hearing about this."

At that point she instructed the school to send the grandfather to their home address even as she bolted from work to head home, too.

When everyone arrived home soon after they found Aerianna on the front steps, where she had cried herself to sleep then woken up and eaten a snack from her backpack while patiently waiting two hours for someone to come home.

Now, Shaw is on a mission to have school policy changed on a couple of fronts. First, she wants a standing policy that prohibits putting a child off the bus without a parent visible extended from just kindergarten to kindergarten through second grade.

She also wants a policy where if conflicting paperwork puts in doubt where a child is supposed to be sent, school officials contact a parent to determine the correct course of action or else hold the child for a responsible parent or guardian.

She said both her and Lavallee had cellphones with numbers the school had, and they should have been contacted before any arbitrary decision was made.

Shaw said she isn't trying to bash the Rochester School Department; she just doesn't want this to happen again.

"My goal is to advocate for the schools, and that something needs to be done about the bus policy," Shaw said today. "And phone calls need to be made if there ever is any confusion."

Shaw said she had spoken with Rochester School Superintendent Michael Hopkins, who said they were working on possible policy changes in the wake of the incident, but that they could take time.

She said her daughter is slowly getting over the trauma of her first day in first grade, but added everybody was lucky nothing worse happened.

"We live on a very busy street where she could've easily been hit if she had panicked and ran out, not to mention how easily she could've been kidnapped. It was the first day of school ... predators look for that exact situation," she said.

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