Pickup truck rear-ends Coeur d'Alene school bus, no injuries reported

A pickup truck rear-ended a Coeur d’Alene Public Schools bus at about 4 p.m. Monday at Appleway Avenue and U.S. 95, one of the city’s busiest intersections, but no injuries were reported. The collision briefly turned an ordinary afternoon route into a traffic and scheduling problem for families moving through the district’s transportation system.

The bus was on Route 28, which serves Winton Elementary, and the district told parents that student drop-offs could be delayed by about an hour while crews cleared the scene and worked to get transportation operations back on track. Even without injuries, the timing and location mattered: the crash happened on a major north-south corridor where congestion can quickly spread through nearby streets and school pickup routines.

Coeur d’Alene Public Schools said it runs about 30 regular bus routes and nine special service routes and transports about 5,000 students each day. That scale means even a single bus delay can ripple through dismissal schedules, after-school plans and work commutes, especially when the disruption lands at a busy crossing like Appleway and U.S. 95. The district said parents are normally notified of delayed student drop-offs through the My Ride K-12 application and that it has a route-delay and student release, or reunification, plan for accidents, breakdowns and road delays.

The district also said it typically communicates weather-related delays or closures as soon as possible, and in most cases by 5 a.m. That same communication network is what families rely on when a bus incident disrupts the afternoon run, underscoring how tightly school transportation is linked to road safety and driver awareness in Kootenai County.

Monday’s crash also recalled a December 7, 2024 school-bus crash in Kootenai County, when a Lakeland Joint School District bus carrying 31 students was involved in a collision near Highway 54 and Clagstone Road. In that incident, one student had a cut lip and the other passengers were evaluated by EMS at the scene, while traffic was blocked for about two and a half hours. Compared with that crash, Monday’s incident ended without injury, but it again showed how quickly school-route safety can become a community-wide issue when a bus is struck on a high-volume road.