A yellow school bus carrying six nonverbal elementary school students disappeared for more than four hours last December, leaving New York City school officials unable to locate the children despite their efforts and prompting a report to the NYPD. The students, ages 6 to 8, were due at P.S. 289 The Brower School in Crown Heights between 8:20 and 9 a.m. on December 16, 2025. The bus did not arrive until 1:25 p.m., and one young girl had urinated on herself by the time she was found.
The account comes from a report by the New York City Special Commissioner of Investigation, first detailed by the New York Daily News. Special Commissioner Anastasia Coleman said the six nonverbal children were left on the bus for hours while officials did not know their whereabouts. According to the Daily News account, the school tried calling the bus vendor, Consolidated Bus Transit, at 10 a.m. that day, but the company did not answer. A dispatcher allegedly told the school shortly before noon that the driver was lost but less than 15 minutes away — yet the students did not arrive until nearly two hours after that estimate.
A Soaked Diaper and a Child Left Lying on a Seat
Per the SCI news release cited by the Daily News, one student was eventually found wet and lying down on a bus seat after urinating and removing her diaper and leggings; a soaked diaper was discovered on the bus floor. The school had already notified the Department of Education's student transportation office about the missing bus, and the disappearance was reported to the NYPD.
SCI launched its probe after receiving a complaint based on allegations from the mother of two of the impacted students, whose backpacks contained location-tracking tags, per the Daily News. The investigation centered on bus driver Eric Chery and matron Germina Thomas, both of whom were on temporary assignment that day, according to a June 30 SCI memo referenced in the report.
Conflicting Accounts From the Driver and Matron
Germina Thomas, who had worked as a bus matron for nearly two decades, said she did not speak with Chery during the multi-hour drive and allegedly did not attempt to contact the school or the bus depot. Eric Chery, who had worked at Consolidated for less than three months at the time, claimed that all students had been picked up an hour earlier than the actual pickup time. He said he went to two wrong school addresses before dispatchers guided him to the correct one. The Daily News reported that Chery had lived in New York City for only a short time and was not fluent in English. Investigators said GPS tracking data showed the bus remained parked at one student's address for an extended period, sitting there until shortly before 11 a.m.
SCI has recommended problem codes for both employees, a designation that, per Hoodline's past coverage of SCI disciplinary actions, bars both DOE offices and outside contractors from ever assigning that person to supervise or work with students again. Consolidated Bus Transit spokesperson Carolyn Daly said the employees have been on administrative leave since the incident, now roughly 10 months earlier, and are barred from Consolidated buses and student interactions while the investigation proceeds under the terms of the labor collective agreement.
A Legally Mandated Tracking System That Failed to Deliver
The breakdown is striking given the oversight tools the city has put in place. Under New York City's Local Law 32 of 2019, all yellow buses contracted by the DOE are legally required to carry active GPS devices transmitting real-time location data to education officials and authorized parents. The city also rolled out the NYC School Bus App in January 2024, a partnership between the Department of Education and transit software provider Via, specifically to give parents real-time tracking of their children's buses.
Yet a December 2025 audit by the Office of the New York City Comptroller found significant gaps in DOE oversight of contracted yellow bus vendors, concluding the agency struggled to enforce and monitor vendor performance. Consolidated Bus Transit, which operates out of East New York, Brooklyn, has provided contracted transportation for the DOE for more than 50 years and employs between 1,000 and 5,000 workers, according to the company's own career listings.
Special Education Students Bear the Brunt of Delays
New York City runs the largest school bus system in the country, moving roughly 150,000 public school students daily, including about 66,000 children with disabilities or living in temporary housing, per City Limits. Students with disabilities rely on that city-contracted transportation to get an education at all, and the data shows they are bearing the worst of the system's failures. Department of Education figures analyzed by Advocates for Children of New York for the 2024–2025 school year found that 94% of bus delays exceeding one hour affected students with disabilities, even though special education routes make up only 74% of overall delays.
The group also reported delays during the 2023-24 school year, part of a pattern that has continued into the current academic year. At the start of the 2026–2027 school year, Advocates for Children reported that about 2,000 students with disabilities initially had no assigned bus routes at all because of vendor driver shortages, forcing the city to offer ride-share vouchers that required parents to ride along as escorts, according to FOX 5 New York.
The Crown Heights case is not the only recent allegation of mistreatment involving a nonverbal child on an NYC school bus. In February, SCI separately referred another case in which a bus driver allegedly verbally threatened to throw an eight-year-old nonverbal student out of a bus window. Coleman said every child deserves safe, reliable, timely transportation, and that SCI will continue investigating safety failures across the system.
