A Fort Worth ISD employee at Woodway Elementary put 6-year-old first-grader Adrianna on the wrong school bus Wednesday afternoon, setting off a frantic hour-long search by her mother that ended with a 911 call. The bus that should have carried Adrianna home to her southwest Fort Worth apartment complex arrived without her, and staff at the school could not immediately say which bus she had actually boarded.
Adrianna's mother, Jaria Branch, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram that she did not know where her daughter was for almost an hour after the bus meant to drop Adrianna off arrived without her aboard. Branch called Woodway Elementary once she realized Adrianna was missing, and when she couldn't get clear answers, she called 911 to report her daughter missing. A Woodway employee had escorted Adrianna and another student, who lives in the same apartment complex, onto the wrong bus that Wednesday, and a Fort Worth ISD spokesperson later confirmed that a Woodway staff member was responsible for the mix-up.
Branch said the ordeal was “really scary,” and according to the same report, she disputed the district's account of when the students actually arrived home. The bus in question left Woodway Elementary at 3:21 p.m., and the district said it dropped the two students off at home around 3:47 p.m. — later than the students' regular drop-off time of approximately 3:31 p.m. Fort Worth ISD ultimately located Adrianna and the other student and routed them home.
A Tracker Suggestion That Fell Flat
As Branch tried to get information, a Woodway employee asked whether she had used the district's bus tracker application, a suggestion the outlet reports frustrated her. Branch said staff could have instead referred to the bus card in Adrianna's backpack that shows her assigned route, and per Branch, an employee hung up on her at one point while she sought information. She went to Woodway on Thursday to discuss the incident with administrators, and Woodway administrators apologized to her, though Branch said parents deserve answers and accountability.
Fort Worth ISD said it takes student transportation and safety seriously, and the district reviewed available video related to the incident, per the Star-Telegram. Woodway's campus had already implemented a color-coded system to direct students to the correct buses after students and staff previously identified buses by number, according to Branch — but she said the color-coded system was insufficient to prevent Wednesday's mix-up. Branch said she is now considering legal action against Fort Worth ISD.
Not an Isolated Mix-Up
Fort Worth ISD had two students placed on the wrong bus during this week, the same week Adrianna's incident occurred. It's part of a documented pattern: in a similar incident in 2025, a Clifford Davis Elementary student was dropped off in the wrong neighborhood, a campus later spotlighted in FWISD's high-dollar turnaround push, Hoodline reported. In 2023, a North Hi Mount Elementary student was also dropped off in the wrong location. And in May 2025, an 8-year-old Fort Worth ISD student with developmental challenges was left off a substitute bus a quarter-mile from home and forced to navigate a busy roadway alone, an error the district attributed at the time to its ongoing driver shortage, according to FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth.
Parent frustration over bus reliability isn't new either. Parents complained of ongoing bus-related issues at a school board meeting back in 2022, and the district enabled GPS tracking on school buses that same year in response to those complaints. Fort Worth ISD later built on that system by launching the Stopfinder mobile app in January 2023 in partnership with Transfinder, giving parents real-time GPS tracking and delay alerts, according to CBS News Texas.
A Department Still Being Rebuilt
Fort Worth ISD hired Nathan Graf as transportation director in 2025, and Graf himself has described the department he inherited as disorganized. Under Graf, the district consolidated its bus terminal operations from three locations down to a single hub on Clark Street in April 2025 to streamline communication and simplify backup driver reassignments, a restructuring effort detailed by KERA News. The district also announced plans in May 2025 to roll out student ID badge-scanning technology on buses to electronically verify boarding and exits, alongside a push to recruit at least 30 additional drivers ahead of the 2025-26 school year.
The scale of the operation helps explain why even isolated errors ripple widely: Fort Worth ISD runs 217 bus routes to transport roughly 13,596 students daily across a district of nearly 70,000 students. Underlying much of the strain is money — Texas state funding covers only about 16% of the district's total transportation operating costs, a gap Hoodline previously reported forces the district to backfill the remaining 84% from local operating funds. Under Section 42.155 of the Texas Education Code, the state only mandates and reimburses bus transportation for students living two or more miles from their assigned campus, leaving districts like Fort Worth ISD to absorb much of the rest.
Tensions over how the district manages its transportation budget haven't been limited to routing. In March 2025, trustees approved a $7 million contract to outsource bus maintenance over objections from longtime district mechanics, who warned that privatized maintenance would raise costs and hurt bus reliability, per KERA News reporting. The debate has echoed elsewhere in Tarrant County — in July 2026, neighboring Crowley ISD fired a bus driver after a pre-K student was left alone inside a parked bus at a transportation yard in triple-digit heat, an incident reported by FOX 4 Dallas-Fort Worth that underscored how supervision lapses have drawn scrutiny across the region's school systems.
For now, Fort Worth ISD says it has located both students involved in Wednesday's mix-up and gotten them home safely, and it maintains it takes student safety seriously. Branch, however, says she's still waiting for the accountability she believes her daughter's case demands, and the Star-Telegram's Matthew Adams reported the story with contributions from staff writer Lina Ruiz.
