A school bus driver in Texas is accused of punishing students by going slowly on a hot day and making them roll down the windows in a car that didn’t have air conditioning.
The heat index made it feel even hotter on Thursday, the day the Sealy Independent School District driver is accused of going too slowly on the bus route on purpose, according to attorney Harry Daniels on Tuesday. Temperatures were in the high teens.
He said that the bus only had airflow from a fan that the driver had for herself. Daniels is the lawyer for the parents of two of the at least 30 kids he says were on the bus.
“She should be fired,” he said of the driver.
The Sealy school system, which is about 55 miles west of Houston, wouldn’t say if the driver was working or not, and they denied that she was driving slowly to punish students.
Chief Bryan Hallmark said, “The driver was going as fast as they thought was safe on a dirt road.”
This is a video that Daniels gave to NBC News. It shows students talking about how hot it is inside the bus. It also showed the bus driver stopping and making the kids raise their windows.
Daniels said the bus should have only taken six minutes to go three miles, but it took thirty. He said he had no idea why the driver was going so slowly or why she made the kids raise their windows.
Based on the film, the driver may have been mad that some students had their hands out the windows.
Daniels said, “I understand that kids can be very difficult to deal with in some situations, but at the same time, you don’t hit them because they’re acting up.” “Make sure they get home safely. That’s your job.” Your job isn’t to make the element too hot and drive a bus very slowly, which feels like pain.
Hallmark said on Tuesday that the district had heard that many buses did not have air conditioning. He said that on Thursday, a bus driver told a student with his head out the window to bring the window back up. A company called Hallmark said the bus driver had to stop for two minutes and twenty seconds during the event.
Doors and hatches on the roof were open along the way, Hallmark said.
He said that the school district had changed the bus route so that kids would get home faster and spend less time on dirt roads.
“These worries are very important to us,” Hallmark said. “The truth is that our buses do get hot down here, especially in the summer.” Thank goodness the weather is getting cooler now.
Neither Hallmark nor the municipal police said they knew of any reports or investigations into what happened by the district police. The municipal police said they had no control over any case involving the bus or schools.
Daniels released a 70-second video of the driver telling the kids, “You shouldn’t have your hands out the window.” to close the windows.
A lot of the riders can be heard whining about how hot it is.
Someone says, “Brother, it’s so hot.”
Someone else says, “Miss, it’s hot back here.” These kids need to take a break. We need to get home.
Someone in the video screams, “It’s not fair!” and someone else says, “Please just take us home!”
Daniels said he works for the mother of two kids on the bus, a boy 12 years old, and a girl 11 years old. The girl with asthma slams the front door and shouts, “We finally feel the air!” in a video of her brothers coming home.
Behind her, her brother walks in without a shirt on. He says, “My shirt got too wet.”
