Mum of little boy left on a daycare bus demands the service stop for good

The mother of three-year-old boy trapped on a Caboolture childcare bus in 2019 has called for such services to be cancelled after another child was left on a bus near Rockhampton.

A Caboolture mother whose young son was left trapped on a daycare bus for 90 minutes says such services should be cancelled after a little girl was left fighting for life after she was forgotten in Rockhampton this week.

The mother, who cannot be named for legal reasons, has told of the emotional upheaval thrust upon her last night as she heard the news a three-year-old girl was found unresponsive after she was allegedly left on a daycare bus in Rockhampton yesterday.

The little girl remains in a critical condition at Queensland Children’s Hospital.

The Caboolture mother said the confronting story left her emotional, recalling her own child’s life-threatening horror story.

“Knowing that she (the little girl) wasn’t responsive that’s even more, I mean it could have happened to me, to my little boy,” the Caboolture mum said.

She said the awful experience, which happened in 2019 and was dealt with in court last year, still haunted her son.

“He still remembers it, he still remembers knocking on the window and calling out for the lady to help him,” she recalled.

“He was strapped in, he couldn’t move, that’s what made me wild, knowing he couldn’t move or ask for help,” she said.

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After watching her young son battle with the memories of being trapped, the mother has demanded a better response from the justice system.

“(There needs to be) harsher consequences, not just a fine, not just losing their privileges of working in a daycare,” she said.

“The lady that left my son on the bus, she can still work at childcare centres just not the same one, and that’s not fair.”

She said ideally childcare centre bus services would be canned.

“No more bus services,” she said.

“I don’t put him on the bus anymore. He was scared that they would leave him again, and as soon as the bus stopped he ran of the bus.”

She said childcare centres needed to better train their staff and implement enhanced health and safety processes.

“Obviously their priority wasn’t the child, if you work in a daycare centre, then that’s your priority,” she said.

“They should be, when they are training them, to drill it into their heads to check the bus, teach them the courses, put signs out in front of the day care centres, saying: ‘stop have you checked the bus yet?’.”

A child was left on a Guppy’s childcare centre bus for 90 minutes in Caboolture in 2019. PHOTO: FILE

“You have a lot of young ones that they might have looked after their niece or nephew here or there but it’s not the same (as a parent),”she said.

“They’ve never had the responsibility of taking care of a child, it’s different when you have responsibility for your own child rather than going straight from Tafe to a childcare centre looking after other people’s kids.”