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Records reveal local incidents
So Contact 5 requested several years’ worth of school bus incident reports. We started with the three largest school districts in our viewing area; Martin, St Lucie and Palm Beach Counties.
St. Lucie and Martin turned us down citing student privacy. Palm Beach County turned over its records and protected students’ identities simply by blocking out their names.
Inside the Palm Beach County reports, we found evidence of serious trouble including a fight on a bus where a girl got hit and started bleeding. Another report described a student getting punched so badly, she was covered in blood. There was one report where a student placed his hands around another student’s throat and started choking him. There were also detailed reports about bus drivers being attacked. One driver described being punched in the face just before the student jumped off the bus. In another case, the driver wrote,” the student first punched my head and my face. I tried to protect myself with my arms, but he was still hitting me. Then, I felt blood coming out of my nose.”
We read another report that described police and paramedics being called to treat the wounded after a school bus altercation. In another incident, one student threatened another with a screwdriver, saying he would stab him. The second student replied by suggesting he was going to get gun.
“To say that all kids behave wouldn’t be an accurate statement,” said Carter.
The incident reports didn’t come from his county, but Carter acknowledged there has been a surge in school bus violence nationwide.
“Remember that we are putting three times as many students on a bus as a teacher might have in a classroom, plus we’re asking the driver to turn their back on them,” Carter said.
“They don’t always see what’s going on behind them, and although they make every effort to watch as they’re going down the road, their main focus has to be on the road.”
Which he says may have been the problem in Tracy Lally’s case.
“He was so upset that he was kind of almost heaving,” said Lally “It brought tears to my eyes to know what happened to him.”
Carter couldn’t confirm details of the incident at the time this story was published, but said if it did happen, the scenario would concern him. In fact, the uptick in school bus violence led Carter to implement new training for his drivers last year.
“We’ve made an extra effort to train our drivers on recognizing bullying because it’s one of the leading problems that we have on buses across the country, not just here.”
St. Lucie County has cameras on about 75 percent of its school buses that are supposed to serve as an extra set of eyes in monitoring bad behavior. But Lally says in both of her sons’ altercations, she was told the camera on board their school bus was broken.
Carter told us his staff makes sure that cameras are in working order, but admits there are times, when cameras break.
Tracy Lally said a seating chart and a second adult to monitor the children would make her feel much better.
“Sometimes we do have an extra adult on a bus,” said spokeswoman Janice Karst.
But Karst said they can’t have them on all of the buses all the time because of the expense. “It’s a matter of money. You know what’s going on with our budgets now. We can’t afford to have an aide on every single bus.” Karst said.
Carter did say drivers have the authority to assign seats. He told NewsChannel 5 he discusses that option with his drivers. He also offered some thoughts to the mom who says young son spent 45 minutes in a moving box, surrounded by bullies with no protection and no way to escape.
“If she (Lally) didn’t get a suitable response to her complaints, even though it might have been going through the referral process, I would like at least the transportation department to do a better job of communicating back with her,” said Carter
“We need to do a better job of getting results back to parents so they know we’re on top of what’s going on. We regret that this happened of course, we regret that she lost confidence in our system and we’ll do whatever we can to regain her trust.”
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