A Texas school bus driver is accused of punishing students by driving slowly during a scorching hot day and making them put up the windows on an un-air-conditioned vehicle.
Temperatures hovered near the triple digits and the heat index made it feel even hotter Thursday, the day the driver for the Sealy Independent School District is accused of deliberately going slow on the bus route, attorney Harry Daniels said Tuesday.
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The only air circulation on the bus was a fan the driver had for herself, said Daniels, who represents the parent of two of the at least 30 students he says were riding the bus.
“She needs to be terminated,” he said of the driver.
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The school district in Sealy, which is about 55 miles west of Houston, declined to detail the driver’s employment status and denied that she was driving slowly to punish students.
“The driver was driving a speed that they felt was safe on a dirt road,” Sealy Independent School District Superintendent Bryan Hallmark said.
Students can be heard complaining about the heat inside the bus in a video Daniels provided to NBC News. It also showed the driver stopping the bus and forcing the children to put their windows up.
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Daniels said that it took the bus 30 minutes to drive 3 miles, but that it should have only taken about 6 minutes. He said he didn’t know why the driver was driving slowly or why she made the students put their windows up.
The video indicates the driver may have been upset that some students had place their hands out of the windows.
“I understand in certain positions, children can be very hard and difficult to deal with, but at the same time, you don’t subject them to some type of corporal punishment because they are misbehaving," Daniels said. "Your job is to make sure they get home safe. Your job is not to inflict excessive heat to the element and drive a bus very slow — like a torture."
The school superintendent on Tuesday said the district had received reports about a lack of air conditioning on many buses. He said that on Thursday a bus driver required a student who was sticking his head out the window to put the window up. During the incident, the driver stopped the bus for two minutes and 20 seconds, Hallmark said.
During the route, roof hatches and windows were open, Hallmark said.
The superintendent said the district had made adjustments to the bus route to reduce the time on dirt roads and to get students home quicker.
"We take these concerns very seriously," Hallmark said. "The reality is, it does get hot on our busses down here, especially in August. Thankfully, now we're experiencing cooler temperatures."
Hallmark said he was not aware of any reports or investigation into the incident by district police, and municipal police said any case involving the bus or schools fell outside its jurisdiction.
In a 70-second video provided by Daniels, the driver stops and tells students to put up the windows because, “you shouldn’t have your hands out the window,” according to the video.
Many of the bus riders can be heard complaining loudly about the heat.
“It’s so hot, bro," one student says.
Another student says, “Miss, it’s hot back here. These children need to breathe, you need to get us home.”
The video ends with a student yelling, "It’s not fair," while another shouts: “Please just take us home.”
Daniels said he represents the mother of two children, a 12-year-old boy and a 11-year-old girl, who were on the bus. In a video of the siblings arriving home, the 11-year-old girl, who has asthma, barges in the front door and exclaims, “We finally feel the air!”
Her brother walks in behind her without a shirt on. “My shirt got too wet,” he says.
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