A school bus driver was fired after being caught on video blowing through a stop sign, the bus carrying young students from an area elementary school. A concerned parent captured the incident with a cell phone, posting the video to social media, claiming the driver was notorious for drifting through the stop on numerous occasions. Once posted, the video was viewed more than 65,000 times in 24 hours. The driver, who worked for First Student, was fired soon after the video went viral. The district originally hired the driver in 2013. She became a driver for First Student when bus services were outsourced to the company a year later.
In an effort to help recruit and retain bus drivers, a Virginia school board has raised the hourly rate for all drivers. The board voted to increase a starting salary for bus drivers to $14 an hour coupled with a 1 percent increase for each year of service. Until the pay increase, bus drivers made a starting hourly pay of $11.48 for four hours behind the wheel. Other counties in the area paid hourly rates of $12 to $15 for the same job. Last year, the school division chose to raise salaries for professional and support staff by 3 percent with available funds. To be fair and equitable to bus drivers, the board extended the increase in salaries this year by almost 20 percent.
The bus driver noticed a problem roughly a mile after picking up children from school—the bus struggled to slow down. Soon after, the Hillsborough County school bus veered right toward a group of trees and ultimately slammed into a lake while flipping onto it’s side with 27 kids and the bus driver on board. Helpless bystanders could only watch the bus overturn and crash into a pond. “I couldn’t run fast enough,” one witness explained. “I just wanted to swim faster, and all I could hear all the voices and all I could think was, ‘I have to get every kid off this bus’.” No one was seriously hurt, but one student walked away from the crash with a small laceration on his right shoulder.
The parents of an elementary school student face misdemeanor charges for failing to properly store a firearm to protect a minor after their son had a gun on board a Surry County school bus. The .22-caliber semiautomatic handgun was found in the student’s book bag after he showed it off on the bus. No one was injured in the incident and authorities found nothing to indicate the boy had the intent to harm anyone. The bus had been on the road for a few minutes when the bus driver noticed the gun and took it from the boy. The gun wasn’t loaded, and no ammunition was found in the book bag.
