Following instructions, Seven-year-old Alannah Cheffen properly crashed a bus. Her parents probably want to see somebody in jail or fired. Even so, ten years from now, when she gets her license, she’ll thank her instructor for the unexpected experience. An experienced driver is one who’s wrecked something. The first rule of driving is “expect the unexpected, right?” The alleged “safety lesson” happened in Independence, Missouri, right outside Three Trails Elementary School.
Second-grader crashes bus
On October 17, New York Post is reporting, “a Missouri second-grader collided a school bus into another bus in front of her elementary school while the driver was allegedly trying to give the children a safety lesson.”
It appears that the incident was prompted by a story in the news about a driver who became incapacitated. The idea to provide proactive training was entirely that of the driver. It was not a district sanctioned lesson, their attorneys insist.
While parents were happily going about their day, after packing the little ones off to school, the ones who had children on a bus involved in the crash got an email. Their kids, it alerted, had been involved in “a minor incident.”
The notification assured that it happened “on school grounds during their morning drop-off.” They carefully worded the message to break the news to parents slowly. Nobody was injured and the day breezed right along “as normal.”
The district noted that one bus “slowly rolled into another while on school grounds.” That’s the truth but not the whole truth.
“The school allegedly left out that a student was at the helm of the massive transportation vehicle when the minor crash occurred.” That would be 7-year-old Alannah Cheffen. Currently in second grade.

Called to the front
The unidentified official bus driver decided to hold an impromptu safety drill, meant to show “the kids what to do if there was a medical emergency, like how to open doors and windows.”
She called for volunteers and was met with raging apathy. “No one wanted to.” That’s when Alannah says “the driver called her to the front to assist and put her in the driver’s seat.”
According to Alannah, “she told me to press that thing and when I pressed it, it made the whole bus go backwards. Then I pressed the gas button and it stopped out of nowhere.”
Her older and wiser sister, Amiyah Brown, was also aboard. She adds that “the driver barely reacted when the minor collision happened while her sister was behind the wheel.”
“When it happened and we hit the back of the bus, she just didn’t say nothing, and she went back and she just parked it like nothing was happening,” Brown relates. It wasn’t that easy to cover up. Ambrosia Holt, the girl’s mother, was furious. She found out what really happened from her daughters.
The school would have never told them that Alannah “was in the driver’s seat during the incident.” Nobody told her it was “her daughter — not the driver —caused the bus-on-bus collision.” If she didn’t know, the other parents didn’t either. Now they do.