WEST PALM BEACH, FL -- Every morning millions of us wake up and send our children off to the bus stop. We wait to make sure they are safely on the bus. Once they get to school, there are teachers, principals and school resource officers keeping an eye on them. But what happens during that 20, 30, sometimes hour-long bus ride to and from school?
The Contact Five team has been on this beat for two years. Much of that time has been spent trying to get access to school bus incident records. What we found, once we finally reviewed the records, was shocking in some cases.
We’ve seen the stories on school bus violence, some of them making national news. Kids beating up bus drivers, beating up each other, and here in South Florida, our cameras were rolling when some teens targeted us, throwing bottles at our windshield.
“It’s a common theme across school transportation,” said Don Carter Director of Transportation for St. Lucie County School. “Those kinds of incidents are on the rise.”
Contact 5 wanted to know how often these problems occur.
Tracy Lally, a Port St. Lucie mom, believes it happens too often. We met up with her last year right after a series of what she calls violent behavior on her sons’ school bus.
“He did win student of the year,” said Lally. “He’s a very mild mannered child, very quiet.” Lally is describing her 5 year-old son after a bus ride home from school last May.
“He was upset,” she remembers. “I asked him what happened and he told me that a certain student, who is also in our neighborhood, had actually decided to choke him, throw him against the back of the seat and then throw him down.” Tracy says she called St. Lucie County’s Transportation Department to report the problem but then, forgot about it, chalking up the fight to boyish behavior.
But two week later, there was another problem on the same bus ride home from school.
“He was trying to take a nap,” Lally recalls. This time she said it was her 8 year old, a 2nd grader.
“He was tired from school and a boy sitting with him just kept slapping him on the head. He kept saying “no stop that.” The boy started yelling in his ear and doing different things to torment him. I guess he didn’t want him to sleep.”
Tracy admits her son finally hit back. But it’s what she says happened next on that bus ride that infuriates her.
“The kid that was sitting with my son had two older siblings on the bus. They heard about what happened and they plus about 3 or 4 other kids came to my son’s seat from the back of the bus,” according to Lally. “They all attacked him with their fists, repeatedly with the seat belt; the hard part of the seat belt was thrown at him, and also a book. They took a large book out of his book bag. It’s about 300 pages. They just hit him over his head continually with that.”
Tracy says her son suffered severe headaches and vomiting from the attack. He even went for neurological testing and had multiple doctor’s visits.
”He’s been put on medicine,” Lally said. “He’s still taking medicine for his headaches on a nightly basis.” Lally said she called her son’s principal, the school district, and the transportation department and told them that 6 students, several of them 6th and 8th graders, allegedly ganged up on her second grade son.
According to Tracy’s boys the bus driver pulled over to get the students back in their seats. But with a brawl like that, an incident report should have been filed explaining what happened. So we asked the St. Lucie County School District to review it.
“We follow the laws surrounding education. One of those is total privacy of anything involving any child in terms of discipline.” said St. Lucie County School District Spokesperson Janice Karst. “From what I understand, I don’t know that there is a report.
That was a year ago, and they may not, unless it rose to the level of some kind of action, remember whether or not they have a report on that alleged incident.”
Karst says she can’t confirm whether the fight even happened on their bus and even if it did, she points to Florida Statute 119, which protects children’s privacy in public records.
But bad behavior was on display in Palm Beach County when NewsChannel 5’s camera was rolling more than a year ago. Our investigative team was working another story, when we approached the back of a school bus. Students onboard were standing up, some of them in their seats and gathered in clusters around the windows. As we attempted to pass the school bus, the teenagers threw several objects at our windshield.
