Autumn Rodgers greets her sons, Dylan and Charlie, at their Hansen Avenue bus stop. Rodgers has started a petition that requests that the Butler School Board amend its bus drop-off policy.

A woman whose two first-graders were dropped off at a Butler School District bus stop without a parent being there has prompted her to start a petition drive to get the bus rules changed.

Like several other districts contacted, the Butler School District does not require a parent to be at a bus stop for children in grades above kindergarten.

Autumn Rodgers said she will attend the school board meeting Monday evening to ask the board to amend the policy to have drivers only drop elementary students off when an authorized adult is at the stop.

Rodgers’ petition is available at Change.org.

She said that dropping a child off at a bus stop without an authorized adult is acceptable once a child is in middle school, but definitely not during elementary school.

Sherry Burka, a grandparent who picks up her grandchild at the same stop, also said that leaving the children there unattended is wrong.

However, Butler’s transportation policy, number 810, reads: “Parents/Guardians must assume responsibility for their child after discharge at the requested stop and provide assurances to the administration’s satisfaction that they would not be placed in a dangerous situation.”

That policy is available through the district website, www.basdk12.org.

Apparently spawning Rodgers’ reaction was a recent incident in which her children’s bus driver left the two children off the bus on the wrong side of busy Hansen Avenue and without either parent present at the bus stop.

Their father on Wednesday arrived at the stop only to see his two children already off the bus and not quite across the street when the bus started to pull away, Autumn Rodgers wrote on her petition page.

Superintendent Dale Lumley said the early drop-off was a miscommunication by the transportation company, Valley Lines.

“Our transportation director rerouted the bus ... for whatever reason, the information did not get to the driver or he did not know it was changing that day so he ended up driving the original route and dropped off students earlier,” Lumley said.

Lumley said the issue has never come up before.

“It has never been an issue or a question before. We’ve heard from no other parents,” he said. “We’ll refer it to the policy committee and see if they think there’s any merit to changing the policy.”

Checking with several other school districts in the county showed that Karns City and Mars school districts allow students above kindergarten to be dropped off without a parent present.

Moniteau School District allows parents or guardians to submit a written request that children between first and fourth grades be dropped only with an authorized adult present.