A school bus driver in Texas is being accused of intentionally driving slowly with all the windows on the bus rolled up in near-100-degree heat in order to punish the kids on her route last week. The school district is standing by their employee’s actions, but video of the incident does raise some questions.
The kids were on their way home in the Sealy Independent School District, about an hour outside of Houston, Texas, according to NBC. A new lawsuit says the school bus driver caused harm to kids after the driver had them pull up their windows and then slowly drove down a sunbaked dirt road:
Temperatures hovered near the triple digits and the heat index made it feel even hotter Thursday, the day the driver for the Sealy Independent School District is accused of deliberately going slow on the bus route, attorney Harry Daniels said Tuesday.
The only air circulation on the bus was a fan the driver had for herself, said Daniels, who represents the parent of two of the at least 30 students he says were riding the bus.
“She needs to be terminated,” he said of the driver.
The school district in Sealy, which is about 55 miles west of Houston, declined to detail the driver’s employment status and denied that she was driving slowly to punish students.
“The driver was driving a speed that they felt was safe on a dirt road,” Superintendent Bryan Hallmark said.
It gets hot in Houston y’all and the kids in the video seem to be legitimately in distress.
I truly respect the job of the school bus driver. It is an incredibly tough gig; you are one person controlling the fates of some 60 kids who respect you less than a substitute teacher. You’re piloting a 15,000 pound vehicle through traffic. My mom drove school buses throughout the ’90s in and around Detroit as well as in the Detroit suburbs in the 2000s (in places with dirt roads!) and the kids could be unruly, rude monsters. That being said, some of the decision-making in this video is difficult to understand.
The district claims the driver had the kids put up the windows because the kids were putting their hands out the windows. She even says as much in the video. While that does seem like a wildly bad idea on such a hot day, kids aren’t supposed to put limbs out the bus window. They could get seriously hurt and this would be normal operating procedure for any driver dealing with kids not behaving, as anyone who has been on a school bus would know. And while a lawyer for the family of two of the kids in the video told NBC there was no other air circulation for the children in the bus, you can clearly see in the video that the top vents are popped to allow airflow.
The next bit, however, is confusing: The bus driver took 30 minutes to go three miles—a drive that normally takes six minutes, according to NBC. The district says the driver was going slower on the dirt road, but having ridden on school buses on dirt roads all through high school I can say that road has to be in seriously god-awful shape for a bus to go that slowly. The dirt road my bus took was a narrow, winding five-mile stretch between a swamp and a lake in a freeze-thaw state. You couldn’t grade the road until it defrosted fully in May, so by February the surface would look like the Battle of Verdun. We’d fly down that fucker and the driver still got us all home mostly on time. A school bus is a pretty sturdy vehicle after all.
No matter what the reasoning, the kids were clearly in distress:
Daniels said he represents the mother of two children on the bus, a 12-year-old boy and a 11-year-old girl. In a video of the siblings arriving home, the girl, who has asthma, barges in the front door and exclaims, “We finally feel the air!”
Her brother walks in behind her without a shirt on. “My shirt got too wet,” he says.
The school district says it is taking steps to reduce route times on dirt roads and address reports of air conditioning not working on school buses.
