Another child dies in school bus

JEDDAH: The education department here has launched an investigation into the death of an eight-year-old boy on a bus on Sunday.
Nawaf Al-Sulami had apparently not disembarked from the bus when it arrived at his private school in the Naseem district on Sunday morning. He was found dead in the afternoon, according to a report in a local publication on Monday.
The investigation has been ordered by Abdullah bin Ahmed Al-Thaqafi, said Abdulmajeed Al-Ghamdi, spokesman for the department. Those involved in the probe include the police and the school’s administration, said Al-Ghamdi.
Makkah police spokesman Col. Atti bin Attia Al-Qurashi said the Arab bus driver, 36, had found the child dead in the bus in the afternoon. He has been detained for interrogation.
Last October, Abdul Malik, a Grade 3 pupil, was forgotten in his school bus and died of suffocation, with an Asian bus driver arrested. The school was shut down permanently by the Education Ministry last December, in the wake of accusations that the school administration was negligent.
The department has urged all schools in the city to check whether students have arrived for school, and when they leave, in a bid to avoid a similar tragedy in future.
These incidents in Jeddah are reminiscent of a similar misfortune in 2010 in Dammam when a five-year-old expatriate girl, Fida Haris, died after being left unattended for five hours in a private vehicle in the hot sun outside the International Indian School.
Since then, the Indian school in Dammam has introduced a series of measures to avoid a similar tragedy, with the introduction of text messaging services. Every morning, between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m., class teachers must inform parents by SMS if their children are absent.
The system was then followed by other schools in Jeddah and in Riyadh. The IISD had urged all schools in the Kingdom to adopt its system, which includes two staff members checking every school bus in the morning to see if any child has been left behind.