Who Should Be Held Responsible?
by Kristin Lizewski - November 10, 2008 9:57am
Imagine a four lane highway, opening up to six lanes at major intersections where on any given weekday, there are countless cars plowing through on their way home from work. Imagine walking down the sidewalk of that street – only there as a bumper so cars stay in the road itself, never really intended for people to walk along – with cars whipping past you at sixty miles an hour. Not just cars, but also large tractor trailer trucks thundering by with tires half the size of you.
Now imagine a little girl, only nine years old, barely tall enough to see over the tire on that truck, standing alone on that sidewalk, a mile away from anything that looks familiar to her. That is where fourth grader Cyrena S. Medbury ended up when her bus driver kicked her off the bus for switching her seat.
When I read this article in the Telegram and Gazette, I was horrified. I’ve grown up living along Route 9. I know it very well, and yet I would still be petrified to wind up alone on the sidewalk – and I’m ten years older than this girl! It makes me very glad to see that an investigation has commenced into how this situation should be handled.
Who should be held responsible?
The blame can’t all be put on AA Transportation. The bus company itself has maintained a very clean record, getting over 4,500 students to school and home safely over the years. But we need to ask who was in charge of hiring this bus driver? He was hired on the pretense that he can drive a big yellow vehicle – which anyone can agree is a challenge – but was it thought to ask how he interacts with children? If he can handle the responsibility of up to seventy-five children in his care at once?
It should be thrown into consideration that this is not the first “lack of judgment” (as School Superintendent Anthony J. Bent calls it) from this particular bus driver, either. The previous school year, he dropped a child off a few miles from her bus stop because she had fallen asleep. She had to run back to where her mother was waiting for her – an eight year old, running by herself through the streets of Worcester. Does that not scare anyone else?
The fact of the matter is this bus driver needs to be held responsible. The parents of this little nine year old girl are one hundred percent right to seek endangerment charges. The protocol for misbehaving children on public school buses is for the driver to file an incident report which gets sent to the school principal so he or she can deal with the situation appropriately. Nowhere in the driver’s contract – or in the realm of common sense – should a child be punished so severely as to be thrown out in the street alone with no protection.
Who else is responsible in this situation? There are rumors circulating the town (that haven’t reached the press yet) that the driver dropped Cyrena off in a neighborhood off South Street in Shrewsbury. His intent was for her to understand that unruly behavior wouldn’t be tolerated, but when given the chance to get back on, the child walked away. It seems like a reasonable plan, if you were driving your own child and had all the time in the world to run after her if she didn’t come back. But one of the responsibilities of working with a child is to watch out for them. If that responsibility stalks off into an unknown neighborhood – you don’t just let them go.
There is no doubt that monitoring up to seventy-five kids on one bus is a challenge, but it would be humorous to see how anyone could argue that it was smarter to kick the child out.
One last thought: props to Haya Vora, a fellow classmate who convinced her father to go back and pick up Cyrena before a less trustworthy person could get their hands on her. Helping someone who’s in need, isn’t that what the American spirit is all about?
Photography Credit: Stop by routemaster_fan
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