A person does not understand love until they have a child. The love of a child is something so strong it is indescribable. When a parent relies on a stranger to make sure their child is safely transported to and from school, that stranger better be the best damn driver, ever.
Recent news articles worry me when I hear that these crazy bus drivers are not being responsible.
I am not a mother, yet, but I already know that I will never allow my child to ever get on a school bus. I plan to be available to drive my children to school and back home just so I know that they are safe because I have a hard time trusting a stranger. Now, I am not saying that parents need to worry about all bus drivers, but observing the recent and past year’s news, I would be chaotic with concern about my child’s safety.
The most recent incident involved Betty Burden, 54, who was arrested this month after failing a field sobriety test and admitted drinking vodka and orange juice before driving with 50 students aboard the bus. Her blood-alcohol content was .226 percent, which is more than three times the legal limit. She was fired. But looking into the case, the supervisor suspected Burden as having a drinking issue two days before her arrest. Two days! That means she was driving other people’s children while being intoxicated only she knows how many times. There’s more, though.
In February of this year, a substitute bus driver passed 10-year-old Trinity Prescher’s bus stop and kicked the girl off the bus about a mile from her home. The weather was below freezing and the girl did not know how to get home from the location she was dropped off, and if she did not have a cell phone on her, she would have been wandering around, scared and cold. She left her mother a voice message, and finally Miranda Prescher found her tear-streaked daughter shivering on the side of a rural highway.
The bus driver was also fired.
This wasn’t the first abandonment situation, though.
A Naperville bus driver was fired after he forced a 13-year-old girl off of his bus because she did not have written permission from the school allowing her to get on a different bus last May. He made Claribeth De La Cruz get off the bus in a subdivision three miles from school. She had a cell phone on her, and called a friend who drove her the rest of the way to school.
De La Cruz had taken the route before with a note from her mother, but the bus driver made a scene and kicked her off anyway. From these two stories, I used to think that a child should have a cell phone when they were in high school and if they participated in after-school activities, but I may allow my children to have them even before then, just in case.
In April of 2009, Yolande Knight, 60, left a 4-year-old boy on the school bus while she went shopping. Knight failed to check her bus after dropping children off at Jefferson School Early Childhood Center in Niles, a school that serves special needs pre-kindergarten children, and had driven the school bus to a shopping center, leaving the child on the bus, unsupervised.
The school had called the police after suspecting the child was still on the bus, and by the time the police caught up with Knight, she had driven to her house with the child still on the bus. The time frame of how long the child was on the bus was not mentioned, but it is strange that the driver did not notice a child on the bus because children that age usually do not stay that quiet.
Another incident that happened in May in Glenwood may have been the most severe. A school bus driver was shot and killed by the police after he lead officers on a wild chase. The driver took the school bus and began ramming into police cars and other vehicles after police tried pulling him over under suspicious driving. Thankfully, there were no children on the bus at the time of the chase, except for another bus employee. The driver did pick up one child, but dropped the child at school before the chase occurred.
Apparently, he was the wrong candidate to be operating a bus to begin with.
I do not know the procedures of hiring a school bus driver, but I feel there should be a little more in-depth research on a person before handing them the keys to a bus that carries other people’s children. I work at a home improvement store, and a fellow employee was a school bus driver for six or seven years before she was fired just two months ago. The minute I heard she was a bus driver when I started at my job, I wondered who would allow her to drive children around. She was not all there, per say. She had her strange talk about her many cats and her imaginary frost bite that seems to keep returning every winter.
She also believes she knows everyone, and everyone is her friend. Let’s just say that she has some issues.
She was driving children around for more than five years, until she had to take a test to evaluate her mental stability, and she failed. Why did she not take the test before she was even hired? Until the bus companies do something differently and hire people who a. like children, b. have a clean driving record and c. are mentally stable— then I might consider putting my child on a stranger’s yellow school bus.
The Lewis Flyer
PDF