WATCH – Bus Driver Praised for Finding Missing Boy: ‘She Is the Best of the Best’

A bus driver in Clarksville, Tennessee, located a missing seven-year-old child who ran away from home and was outdoors all night wearing only a pair of shorts.

Ayden Price left his house on Rosebrook Drive at approximately 9:15 p.m. on Wednesday after getting into trouble with his mother, WKRN reported Friday.

Authorities searched throughout the night and the Tennessee Highway Patrol was called in to assist with their efforts. However, it was a bus driver who spotted him wandering at 6:45 a.m. on Thursday, just blocks from his house.

Stephanie Dollich has worked as a bus driver for the Clarksville-Montgomery County School System for the past 13 years and was on her normal route when she saw Ayden.

Dollich put the bus in park and took him inside, wrapping him in a warm blanket. She said she loves her students and was simply performing her job to keep children safe.

“As I was going down the road, what I had seen off in the distance had looked like a child to me walking down the road. And so as I got closer, I pulled my bus over and stopped my bus. And I noticed that it was this little boy that was missing,” she recalled.

“And when he got on the bus, I had him sit down and then my bus aide put the blanket around him and I radioed my dispatchers and notified them to call 911 to let them know that I had the missing child,” Dollich continued.

“Just to know he’s back home safe with his parents, that feels great,” she added.

Dollich received much praise due to her efforts to find the child.

“She is just the best of the best in terms of the example that she’s setting for everybody,” DOE Commissioner Penny Schwinn commented:

Ayden was barefoot and still wrapped in the blanket when officers took him home on Thursday.