Schools

Mom Says School Bus Driver Lost Track Of Daughter

Bus company says driver will get retraining in policies.

A Huntington mother said a school bus driver frightened her daughter by driving her down the wrong roads, passing her school and ignoring her because he was on the phone.

The woman, who did not want to be identified, said her fifth-grade daughter was picked up last week by a Huntington Coach driver who instead of driving her to nearby Maplewood School drove her east nearly to Greenlawn until the girl was able to get his attention; he then turned around to deliver her to school. She was the only student on the bus at the time.

The mother said  that her daughter reported that she had been crying on the bus, and that she told her mother that evening, "I did not know where he was taking me, and that maybe he was going to kill me." The  mother said the daughter told her the driver apologized when he dropped her off at school at 8:36 a.m., and said she should have arrived by 8:20 for an early music program.

Huntington Coach said it suspended the driver for retraining but cast the event differently, saying that the driver was unable to turn into School Lane to drop her at the school because of a car obstructing his route. Brendan Clifford, vice president of operations at Huntington Coach, said the driver had to proceed onto Park Avenue and then Lake Road to circle back to the school.

Clifford said that the driver's phone records indicate he was not using it while on the route but that the driver was suspended and would undergo retraining on company procedure and state law regarding cell phone use while driving.

"Upon completion of fact finding," Clifford said, "we met with the driver to discuss the incident. He was very apologetic about the confusion, and realized that he should have radioed in to the office to let us know what was happening. The driver served a three-day suspension, during which he underwent retraining with our training department, focused on the Company Policies involved in this incident."

Clifford said that Karen Occhiogrosso, the assistant superintendent for business at the South Huntington School District, asked the company to remove the driver from the South Huntington roster and that he will no longer drive in the district.

The mother criticized the bus company for its  response to her, saying that despite multiple calls to the company that day, no one would discuss the issue with her until she threatened to call the news media.

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 In a letter to South Huntington School District Superintendent Dr. Thomas Shea, she praised both Alison Bruno, assistant principal  at Maplewood School and the South Huntington school district for its quick response.

"The school district was wonderful and did everything correctly," she said Sunday. But Huntington Coach, she said, was a different matter. "The casualness of the response had me in tears," she said. "I'm just not going to let this go."

She also raised these questions in her letter to Shea:

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  • Why is it that if a bus driver is not good enough for our district he/she can be allowed in another district?
  • Why is it that an early bus can go with one or two students on it?
  • How can a bus driver fail to drop off the only student he picked up?
  • Why is it I still don't have an explanation from Huntington Coach as to what he was actually thinking? If it was a matter in which he "just forgot," should he be driving anyone at all?
  • Why was the bus driver on the phone?

Shea's office said in a statement, "When we were first informed about an incident that occurred with a driver from Huntington Coach, a company from which the district subcontracts approximately 20% of our transportation needs, we acted quickly and decisively to express our concern and dissatisfaction and to ensure that this driver be prohibited from transporting any of our students in the future."


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