KNOXVILLE - A mother of a sixth-grade boy with special needs says her son was left on a bus for more than five hours.
Lenise Littlejohn told WBIR-TV that she put her son, who has cerebral palsy, on a bus at 7:41 a.m. Sept. 5, but he fell asleep on his way to school and wasn't found until about 1 p.m.
Littlejohn says she wasn't informed about the incident until more than two hours later when school officials personally brought him home.
"He's just sitting there, and it's like 80 or 90 degrees, however many degrees it was," she said. "It's 10 times hotter on a bus or in a car with the windows rolled up."
Littlejohn said it could have ended up much worse.
"I don't have any trust in the school system," she said. "I mean, because if you can let this happen to a special needs kid, then what are you doing with all the rest of the kids?"
Knox County Schools' spokeswoman Melissa Ogden says the district contacts out for bus drivers but is no longer contracting with the company that hired the driver in question.
"The transportation department permanently removed the driver from the roster of approved drivers," she said in an email. "We have reported the incident to DCS."