Recently there have been several stories in the news highlighting the dangerous actions of bad school bus drivers ranging from screaming at children inappropriately, driving under the influence, or endangering students in other ways. However, a recent story out of Canada shows that sometimes things are not how they appear at first glance.
Earlier this month, the Edmonton Catholic School Board called for the firing of a driver who is shown on video kicking a student off the bus for bad behavior 10 blocks from his stop, saying that he put the student at risk by not dropping off the student at his stop.
After more footage from the incident surfaced this week, the school board has backtracked and apologized to the driver.
In the new video, obtained without audio from a dash cam installed in the school bus, a student is shown getting out of his seat several times to punch and kick another younger student repeatedly. Then, another student approached the driver and hits the driver over the head before exiting at his stop.
The clearly exasperated driver takes a deep breath and attempts to compose himself, but the first student begins gesturing with his middle finger and repeatedly pointing towards the driver. According to CBC News, The full video shows the driver radioing in, but the boy continues talking and it appears an argument breaks out between the two.
Finally, the driver comes to an abrupt stop and tosses the student’s backpack off the bus before telling the student to leave the bus as well.
When the first video from the incident, recorded from a student’s cell phone, became public, the school board quickly put out a message demanding the driver be fired for improperly handling the situation. Despite the message, the school bus company responsible for managing the fleet refused, instead opting to remove the driver from any Catholic district routes.
Over the following days, things changed remarkably as the district retracted its demand after the second video began to circulate online and painted a significantly different picture than the first video.
“In light of the second video showing an assault on the driver, we realize we should not have requested the driver’s termination and have apologized to his employer, Cunningham Transportation Service, and will be apologizing to the driver as soon as we can reach him,” board spokeswoman Lori Nagy said in statement Tuesday.
Nagy still contends the driver did break several rules for handling disciplinary issues, but under the circumstances it was an understandable way to deal with a quickly escalating situation.
Laura Doroshenko, operations manager for Cunningham Transport, told reporters the driver had only installed the dashcam the afternoon of the events in question, after hearing of potential problems on the route home from students on the morning route.
Doroshenko also says the driver attempted to handle the situation properly at first, but the company failed to appropriately address the situation.
“He had tried to radio in a couple of times,” she said. “We were really busy. He didn’t indicate he was having an emergency at the time. He was just radioing in.
“There was a lot of other people doing the same thing. He just got lost in the shuffle.”
Notably, the company says the route is known for problems and has a high turnover rate for school bus drivers. The driver involved in the incident has been a part of the company for over five years but had only been on that route for two weeks.
See the video report from CBC News below:
