SCHOOL BUS CRASH REPORTS 2007

Wheeler Students Hurt in Accident
May 29, 2007

PROVIDENCE — A tour bus carrying 39 Rhode Island middle school students skidded off the highway outside Quebec City late Sunday night, toppling onto its side in a ditch.

The students and four teachers, from The Wheeler School in Providence, were treated for minor injuries at local hospitals, according to school officials.

They all returned to Providence around 11 last night, except for one chaperone, a French teacher, who suffered a fractured clavicle and remained in Canada for treatment. The woman, whose name was not released, is expected to fly home today.

“It was clearly extremely scary for the kids,” Head of School Dan Miller said. “It sounds like a terrifying experience.”

Daniel Pikar, 14, an eighth grader at Wheeler, compared the incident to a bad dream.

“I was asleep. Then, the next thing I was in the air looking down. I hit my head on the headrest,” he said after arriving in Providence last night.

Eighth grader Joseph R. Paolino, 13, the son of the former Providence mayor, said, "This was just really scary. It's good to be home."

"I think I'm the happiest dad in Providence right now," said his father as he picked him up at the school last night.

The accident occurred around 9 p.m. Sunday during a sudden downpour, according to Mark Clarke, the president of Montreal-based Jumpstreet Tours, which organized the field trip.

Before the accident, the bus had been traveling in a slow-moving caravan of charter buses on a rural stretch of Highway 269, Clarke said.

The students had recently left a dinner and celebration at the Napert sugar shack, a maple syrup manufacturer, and were returning to their hotel, the Saint Louis Inn, on a windy and cloudy night.

The bus slid off the wet, paved road and came to rest in a ditch of “soft dirt,” Miller said. Television footage showed rescue vehicles parked alongside the overturned bus, their lights flashing.

Though most of the students and faculty escaped the crash with minor cuts and bruises, all were taken by bus or ambulance to the hospital for examination.

The students and faculty were treated at either the Hotel Dieu de Levy or Enfant Jesus, and all but the French teacher and two students were released Sunday night, according to Young Un, head of the middle school at Wheeler, a private school that teaches nursery school through grade 12.

One student required several stitches above his eye, Clarke said.

“The weather was terrible,” Un said. “They were not driving at a high rate of speed. The bus skidded off the road. It lost control.”

The bus — a 2005 luxury motor coach with television screens and a washroom — had no seat belts, Clarke said.

An English-speaking police spokesman in Quebec was not available for comment last night. Un said the driver of the bus had not been criminally charged.

The bus was owned by Foxy Travel Inc., of Linwood, Mass., and arranged for Jumpstreet by Card Tour and Travel, of South Easton, Mass., Clarke said. A woman who answered the phone at Foxy Travel declined to comment last night. A spokesman for Card Tour and Travel was not available.

The driver had a good record and had worked with Jumpstreet before, Clarke said. This was the second trip Jumpstart has organized for The Wheeler School, he said.

“He’s a very competent driver. The weather must have been extreme,” Clarke said. “Thank heavens that everyone is going home safely and soundly. This is an event that could have been a tragedy.”

Last night, school officials scheduled a private meeting with parents for 10 p.m., to be led by Un and the school psychologist, Peggy O’Neil. Parents remained at the Hope Street school building until their children arrived.

By then, Un and Miller had been awake for more than 24 hours. Un learned of the accident around 9 p.m. Sunday from a parent who had received a mobile phone call from her child in Canada minutes after the bus crashed.

“Everything turned upside down,” Un said, describing the rapid spreading of the news and the anxious responses to the accident. “It was nonstop throughout the night.”

He and his assistant, Lisa Mello, called every parent and spent the rest of the night fielding phone calls. School officials later posted information on the school Web site, www.wheelerschool.org, updating the posting several times throughout the next day.

Though it prompted deep concern in Rhode Island, the crash caused remarkably little disruption in the annual field trip.

The students — 29 eighth graders and 10 seventh graders — left for Quebec at 6:30 a.m. Friday. By the time the accident occurred, they had completed most of their activities, including a walking tour of Old Quebec, a ferry trip across the Saint Lawrence River, a cable car ride to waterfalls and the night of feasting and dancing at the sugar shack.

A Monday morning breakfast was the only activity canceled. The group left around noon yesterday and pulled into the school’s parking lot at about 11:15 last night, as parents applauded their arrival.

The Quebec trip was an optional excursion. A mandatory eighth-grade trip to Block Island was scheduled to begin at 9 a.m. today, but the 29 eighth-grade students returning from Canada will not join their classmates until tomorrow.

That was the school’s decision, Un said.

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