KANSAS CITY, Mo. -- Tuesday's snowy, slick roads made the ride home on the school bus long and treacherous for some students, parents said.

Kevin Carew, 7, was at home Wednesday playing in the snow in his front yard. The school bus couldn't get down his street because of the ice, his mother said.

Kathy Carew was upset that the same icy roads kept the school bus from bringing him home early or on time on Tuesday. She said she never got a call from his school, Pitcher Elementary. And when he still wasn't home by 5:30 p.m., she started to panic.

"Especially when it gets dark and there's ice, that's pretty scary," Carew said, who said she called but couldn't get through to the school bus company.

Carew said, "I called the school at that point. The school said they had my son, he'd been there the whole time. He was not allowed on the bus because the driver already knew she couldn't make it."

Carew said she was told she would have to come pick up her son a few blocks away on Highway 40.

Terry Benson, the grandmother of another student, said, "No fair warning, nothing. No one knew where the kids were."

Benson's granddaughter is a student at West Rock Creek Elementary, another Kansas City, Mo. school. She said the district should have sent the kids home by noon on Tuesday, before the streets got hazardous.

"Not only for the well being of the children of this area, but also the other citizens, the bus driver. They really put a lot of people at risk over this deal. This is ridiculous," Benson said.

A spokesman for the Kansas City, Mo., School District said district officials strive to keep parents informed about schedule changes, and they are looking into this situation to try to determine what happened.