Palm Beach County (Fla.) district will pay $200,000 to family of boy left on bus
The Palm Beach County (Fla.) district will pay $200,000 to the family of a 7-year-old autistic boy left on a school bus for more than five hours in 2015.
The Palm Beach Post reports that school board members approved the payment to the boy’s parents, Eva Palomino and Eddi Guevara, to settle a lawsuit over the incident.
The boy, a second-grader at J.C. Mitchell Elementary in Boca Raton, boarded a bus to school on Oct. 12, 2015, but never made it to campus.
Instead, the child remained on the bus as it picked up and dropped off middle school students, then rode with the driver and aide as they returned to a bus compound in Boynton Beach.
There, the driver and aide evidently left the bus without doing a thorough inspection, officials said. That morning area temperatures climbed into the low 80s.
Drivers and aides, if their bus has no alarm, are required to do a check for children and hang an “EMPTY” sign on the rear window, according to the district’s bus driver handbook.
The boy was discovered on the bus hours later by a mechanic. He did not require medical treatment.
The driver and aide on the bus were arrested on charges of child neglect.
The family sued the School Board in 2017 for negligence, contending that the boy suffered mental anguish and required counseling as a result of his experience. A jury in December awarded the family $424,600.
The district appealed the verdict, and the two parties agreed to settle for $200,000 settlement, the maximum that someone can recover for government wrongdoing in Florida without a special act by the state legislature.
