6-year-old special needs student left on bus for 7 hours

LACEY, Wash. - A Washington state school bus driver responsible for leaving a special-needs first-grader on the bus for seven hours in suburban Olympia has resigned.

KOMO reports that the 6-year-old was picked up from a Lacey elementary school and was supposed to have been dropped off at a day care. Instead, the boy was taken to the school district's transportation yard where the bus was parked for the night.

The boy's foster mother assumed his biological mother had picked him up from the day care, and he wasn't reported missing for several hours.

Thurston County sheriff's deputies found him just before 11 p.m. The district says the driver, a substitute, acknowledged that he didn't check the bus before parking.