How to throw a child off a bus

company hadn’t pointed this out to the family. The mother acknowledges this and isn’t ducking responsibility for having forgotten to settle up.

Having said that, down Gore way Ritchies isn’t the easiest outfit in the world to settle up with.

You don’t get bills, you don’t get invoices, they don’t have an eftpos machine and they don’t do phone banking. All a tad unhelpful, in this day and age. So the mother had to go down to the depot and pay cash and she accepts responsibility for having clean forgotten to do so.

There had to come a point where the child may no longer ride. But in this case it was horribly mishandled. The family say they weren’t given a deadline and they deny the company’s contention that they were advised by phone that no further rides would be accepted.

Make what you will of that. It’s what follows that was most emphatically unacceptable.

The 10-year-old climbed aboard with her 13-year-old sister, who attends a different school for which no fare was required.

The driver promptly ordered the younger sister off the bus, and then closed the door on her big sister who, reasonably, had wanted to get off with her. The distressed girl was left to walk the 3 kilometres home. Alone.

To its credit, Ritchies’ head office acknowledges this was both incorrect procedure and ‘‘very poor judgment’’ by its local management, not to be repeated.

Good. Because depositing children by the roadside is not a valid method of debt recovery, nor a tolerable ‘‘let that be a lesson to your parents’’ gesture.

Parents do get disorganised and underperform from time to time. As do bus companies. But what matters most is child safety and in this case it was compromised by an indulgent decision that smacks of exasperated petulance.

That doesn’t mean a bus company must provide free travel if parents are prepared to be sufficiently lax, or stubborn, about paying. It may even come down to calling in third-party authorities, be they the school, the Ministry of Education, or even the police.

But there’s only one way to throw a child off a bus. Into someone else’s safe care. Failing to do so risks not only stories like this one, but darker stories. Ones that include the phrase: ‘‘The child was last seen...’’