Providence school bus drivers Mary Braswell, left, and Linda Webber tell of being stuck in traffic during Thursday’s snowstorm, before leaving for their afternoon runs yesterday.

The Providence Journal / Bill Murphy

PROVIDENCE — Providence Schools Supt. Donnie Evans didn’t realize that roughly 100 students were stranded during Thursday’s snowstorm until 8 p.m., when he got a call from Police Chief Dean Esserman.

According to Evans, Esserman called and said, “Do you need me to help you?”

Evans said he didn’t know what the chief was talking about. When Esserman told him that dozens of school buses were stranded on the city’s gridlocked streets, Evans said, “Oh, really?”

Evans immediately called his chief of operations, Tomas Hanna, who confirmed that some students hadn’t made their way home seven hours after the first buses started rolling.

“We own the problem,” Evans said in an interview yesterday. “I’m a parent myself and I’m very angry. I’m angry we put students in this situation.”

But Bill Roche, contract manager for First Student in Providence, tells a different story. He said that the bus company made a concerted effort to keep the School Department informed:

“We knew we were stuck by 2 p.m. We were in constant contact with the School Department all day, first every 15 minutes and then every 5 minutes by evening.”

Roche, however, wouldn’t say whom he spoke with at the School Department, saying only that it involved people who worked in transportation and operations.

Only a few miles away, Warwick, which uses the same bus company, avoided a crisis by keeping in contact with the bus drivers by radio to make sure students were safe. With the mayor out of state and the superintendent on sick leave, the lack of leadership could have proved calamitous. But several district directors stayed in the school transportation office throughout the afternoon and early evening.

By 5 p.m., Warwick’s children were safely home, but the nightmare was just beginning for students in Providence.

The police began plucking students off buses around 7:30 p.m., when officers found a bus that had slid off Manton Avenue. When they found more buses off the road in Olneyville, housing officers driving sport-utility vehicles piled dozens of children inside and ferried them home.

Meanwhile, the police said they weren’t told until 8:30 p.m. that there were children still unaccounted for. Once the School Department notified them, they mobilized cruisers and SUVs to find the stranded children.

“We made it our highest priority,” said Maj. Paul Fitzgerald of the Providence Police Department.

Fortunately, the bus drivers and principals did their jobs and no one was injured.

The police found one school bus with special-needs students stuck in traffic near Dean Street. Jeanne Andreoli’s 5-year-old son, Jovanny Green, was on that bus, and he didn’t make it home until 10:36 p.m., when he showed up in a police cruiser, she said.

“He was exhausted,” she said last night. “He was so tired, he didn’t want to talk much about it except for the police car ride.”

She said the children had tried to use a bathroom at a nearby business but were turned away. But the employees at the Coca Cola bottling plant came to the rescue, letting the children use the facilities and handing out snacks and soda.

While most bus runs averaged three or four hours, a few had children on them for seven or eight hours. According to Roche, the bus drivers were in contact with headquarters via two-way radio, and the company also tracked the whereabouts of buses by Global Positioning Systems installed in each bus.

So why wasn’t Evans notified of the crisis earlier?

Evans said he doesn’t have the answer, but promised to look into why his office wasn’t told right away that a crisis was brewing. He said he will look into the communications breakdown between First Student and his office and between his office and parents, who wondered where their children were.

Evans gave the following account of what happened Thursday: After conferring with several superintendents in the area, he decided at 10:45 a.m. to close schools two hours early. His office sent out a computerized phone message to all parents that their children would be released, with secondary students dismissed at 12:35 p.m. and elementary students at 1:05 p.m.

Because the storm moved faster than originally predicted, many of the buses returning from their middle-school runs became mired in snow and traffic before they could reach the elementary schools.

“Hindsight is always 20/20,” Evans said. “If I had known that there would be such a crisis, I would have let the elementary school students go home earlier.”

As the storm intensified, Evans said that he was unaware of the growing bus crisis, adding that he was monitoring communications between the principals and the main office.

“Once the bus left the school, communications stopped,” he said. “There was a serious breakdown in communications between First Student and the School Department.”

Evans stayed in his office until about 5:30 p.m. and then went to his home on the East Side, which turned into a two-hour commute. When he left, he thought that everything was under control.

“I went home because there was a plan in place for the last 12 kids at Kizirian Elementary School,” Evans said. “I felt comfortable. I really did.”

If he had realized that 60 buses were still out there in the storm, Evans said he never would have left his Westminster Street office.

When he got the call from Esserman, he considered returning to work but figured he would be just as effective working the phones from home. At 8 p.m., he shifted into high gear, he said, maintaining constant phone contact with both the police chief and the mayor.

Still, by 9:30 p.m., 43 busloads of students were still caught in the storm.

Meanwhile, elementary school principals were trying to juggle the impossible: keeping youngsters safe and happy while calming dozens of frantic parents and tracking the whereabouts of the school buses.

At Harry Kizirian Elementary School, Principal Debbie Ruggieri waited until 9:30 p.m. for the police to take eight students home. The last bus, she said, never made it back to school.

“The kids had fun,” she said. “They were dancing, coloring, watching a movie. When they left, we gave them some extra mittens and hats.”

At Windmill Elementary School on Paul Street, the staff entertained about 40 children with pizza while teachers called every household to let them know that the buses were running very, very late. The first bus didn’t arrive at the school until 3:30 p.m.

“We had no idea where Bus 86 was,” Principal Eusebio Lopes said. “We couldn’t get through to the bus company because the phones were jammed. I felt bad for those kids.”

A parent finally told Lopes that Bus 86 was stuck somewhere in traffic, hopelessly late. The bus finally chugged up to Windmill around 7:30 p.m. but by then, only seven children were left.

It wasn’t until 11:30 p.m. that all of the children were safely home.

One 8-year-old boy spent six hours without food, access to a bathroom or knowledge of what was happening, according to his parents, Matty and Yesha Proctor of Providence. The Proctors called the school, only to be told to call the bus yard. When they called the bus yard, the number was busy. When they called the school back, no one answered.

Finally, another parent took matters into his own hands. He drove down Chalkstone Avenue until the traffic came to a standstill. Then he trudged through the snow for 90 minutes until he found the right bus. He took the children he knew off the bus and, after the roads cleared, drove them home. He returned home around 10 p.m.

“Someone needs to be held responsible for this completely incompetent disaster,” the Proctors wrote in an e-mail to The Journal. “Something needs to change. This never should have happened. And now, since it has, it must never happen again.”

With reports from Daniel Barbarisi and Amanda Milkovits

lborg@projo.com