COCOA, Fla. – A 9-year-old and his mom are sorting out a scare in Brevard County.
On Monday afternoon, Alicia Aiken said Endeavour Elementary School sent the boy home and told him to walk to his house two miles away across a major highway.
Aiken said her son, Ronald, usually gets a ride from school, but this week, she was supposed to pick him up and was late on Monday.
“All these cars driving fast, if I made the wrong step, I would have got hit by one of them,” Ronald, with his mother, told your Cocoa Community Correspondent James Sparvero.
“He was nowhere to be found. So, I start panicking as a mother,” Aiken recalled about arriving at the school.
Aiken said she told the school she’d be picking her son up all this week, but Brevard Public Schools said she didn’t fill out the paperwork.
Aiken said there was no paperwork.
Sparvero asked Ronald how dangerous it felt to walk across busy State Road 520 when he was only 9 years old.
“Walking home by myself at a young age, yeah, that’s kinda dangerous,” the boy said. “Anybody could stop and just grab me.”
Aiken and the district said they’ve cleared up the misunderstanding about how Ronald’s getting home this week.
“They have apologized to me, and I said, ‘What if something would have happened to my child,’” she said. “And when I seen him, all I could do is hysterically give him a kiss, hug him, and I was so like, upset.”
Ronald talked about that moment too.
“She was praising the lord for keeping me safe,” he said.