While the weather in New York City Tuesday, Jan. 7 marked the coldest Jan. 7 in 118 years as Central Park fell to just 5 degrees, according to NBC 4 News, New York City students have had a tough time getting to school since Thursday when schools re-opened.

On Friday, schools closed for snow, and on Tuesday, with record-low temperatures, attendance was just 72.6 percent because of a change in bus companies.

For the 40,000 students that rely on school busses to get to school, they were met with chaos last week as the Department of Education scrambled to get all 1,600 routes covered by other companies after Atlantic Express - the largest school bus company in the city -went bankrupt. They stopped operating on the last day of 2013.

Allied Transit picked up 113 new routes from Atlantic. Last year, with just 34 routes, Allied had the worst safety record of any bus company in the city, according to data obtained by DNAinfo.

After unsuccessfully driving around to locate the school, it was an Allied Transit driver that unloaded a group of elementary students back where they'd been picked up, even though all the parents had left.

Seven-year-old Darius Mason was one of those students.

"We kept telling him the number, the way to go, all of that," Darius told NY1 News while choking back tears."This is outrageous, 'cause he just left us on the street, and I don't know why he would do that 'cause we are just little kids. And there are pre-k there, like from pre-k to kindergarten to first grade to second grade, and he left us on the street. But you can't do that to little kids."

The company suspended the driver while the DOE investigates.

On Thursday, the DOE transportation office fielded nearly 4,200 calls, and on Monday, they fielded another 4,000.