Southern Legal Counsel gets bus driver replaced after she endangered immigrant children

by Nancy Kinnally

Early on a September morning in 2023, Gainesville, Fla., resident Yuly Rojas was waiting at the school bus stop with her son, Juan, 11, when something frightening happened.

“My son ran out and went to get on the bus, and she closed the door on him. I was able to get to him, but he almost fell because she started up,” said Rojas, one of seven mothers present at the time. “That was when we started to tell each other that this is not normal, and I stated that I would not send my child on the bus again because it was dangerous.”

This was not the first time the driver had taken off without picking up the children at the stop, where seven Latin American immigrant families waited each day for the bus to take the students to Carolyn Beatrice Parker Elementary School, which offers an English as a Second Language (ESOL) program.

In one incident, the driver allegedly closed the door on a 5-year-old boy’s fingers. Rojas said the driver waited for the boy to withdraw his hand before driving off without picking the children up.

“She was mistreating the kids repeatedly. She would stop at the bus stop, close the door and move on,” Rojas said. “We felt discrimination, racism.”

Rojas said parents contacted the school, which simply referred them to the school district’s transportation department, saying the school had no control over the bus drivers.

“So, we contacted the person in charge of transportation. And they justified the bus driver. They didn’t answer emails, and nobody did anything,” Rojas said. “My son had, during this period, about 10 absences because I couldn’t I take him, and I had no means to take him. I had stated [to the school] that his absences were because I didn't have a car or a way to take him to school. We were recently arrived, and we didn’t have a vehicle yet.”

The parents even attended a School Board meeting, hoping to raise the issue of the driver’s behavior, but when they got there, only one mother was given the opportunity to speak. Rojas said that mother focused her allotted three minutes on a specific incident in which she said the driver had confiscated some food items her child had been given to take home through a program for low-income families.

Again, nothing came of their efforts to raise the alarm. The parents then started trying to document what was happening at the bus stop.

“We started making occasional videos, but whenever things happened, we weren’t recording. But we had two successful recordings that showed the bus pass and not stop,” Rojas said.

At that point, Adriana Menendez, social service manager with Rural Women’s Health Project, put the parents in touch with Southern Legal Counsel, a statewide public interest law firm based in Gainesville that has an education advocacy practice, among other civil rights projects.

SLC attorney Dan Marshall set up a meeting with school district officials, including the transportation director and the district’s attorney.

“All the moms wanted was a different bus driver,” Marshall said. “They were concerned about the kids’ safety.”

He said he could see that the problem had been swept under the rug, in spite of the parents’ efforts.

“It’s only when you get attorneys involved that things change,” Marshall said.

At the meeting, the school district showed videos from cameras mounted in various locations on the school bus.

“The whole time they doubted we were there. But we were always there. You can’t miss 14 people standing there,” Rojas said. “They began to show us the recordings in real time. There were two exact dates in which we had our own video. So, they showed the exact time and date. You couldn’t see well at first. When the recording was played quickly, it could have looked like a tree. But then they put it in slow motion. And then you could see us all waiting for the bus. Then they said, with this we are certain.”

The next day, which was the last day of the term before the winter break, a substitute driver showed up to pick up the children. And when the next school term began in January, they had a permanent replacement.

“They sent us this new woman who has been super punctual,” Rojas said. “The bus always comes at 6:20, stops, and waits for the children to get on and sit down before she starts up. Our experience with this woman is totally different.”

Rojas says she never learned what happened with the other driver, but for now she is just happy her son and the other children can get to school safely.

“We are super satisfied with Southern Legal Counsel’s help,” she said. “At that time, we were alone here, literally. We didn’t have anyone’s help. We didn’t get a response from the school, from the district, from the transportation department. So, really, until they saw that we were backed by a group of lawyers, they didn’t take our case into account. For us it was a big help.”

She says she and the other parents are grateful.

“If it hadn’t been for that, I don’t know how it would have turned out,” Rojas said. “I would have taken my child out of the school,” which she had chosen because of the ESOL program her son needed.

“But thank God, everything is resolved,” she said. “The new bus driver is super attentive, super kind to the children. We have no complaints at all.”

SLC Executive Director Jodi Siegel said that many education cases can be resolved through meetings rather than litigation, which is often necessary in some of the organization’s other practice areas.

“In our representation, Southern Legal Counsel often seeks systemic reform to change the problem at its source,” Siegel said. “But sometimes education advocacy can be as simple as being a voice for the voiceless and showing up to a meeting with a J.D. after your name so that school officials know they will be held to account.”