Green Mountain Transit officials say a bus driver didn’t follow company protocol when he ejected students from his route last week, but his actions were not race-based.
Burlington School District officials met with the transit company Tuesday following Burlington mother Rebecca Mack’s viral Facebook post that claimed a bus driver forced only children of color to exit the bus for “singing and clapping.” Mack said the children, including two of her own, told her that white kids were allowed to remain seated.
The May 23 incident prompted the Burlington City Council to demand GMT attend its next meeting to explain what happened.
“This was the most personally racist event that had ever happened to them,” Mack, a white woman, told Seven Days about her children’s experience. “It’s something that’s never going to go away.”
On Wednesday afternoon at its Industrial Parkway headquarters, GMT allowed Seven Days to watch onboard video of the incident. The bus cameras captured the scene from three different angles.
About four minutes into the ride, the driver parks the bus, walks down the center aisle and says, “Everyone in the back — off” and then threatens to call the police if they don’t leave.
It’s chaotic and loud as the students protest, but they eventually go. The video shows students of all races among those ejected onto North Street. Some attempt to get back on. The driver is then seen attempting to reach GMT’s dispatch on his cell phone, marketing and public affairs manager Jamie Smith said.
The driver disconnects the call and returns to the front. One camera angle shows a white student who was kicked off the bus yell “faggot!” at the driver just before the bus pulls away. The students of all races give chase and follow the bus to its next stop, banging on the side walls. Children of color and white students remain on the bus.
GMT general manager Mark Sousa said the driver is on paid administrative leave while the company investigates. The driver has worked for GMT for several years and often picks up students on this same route, Sousa said.
“Looking at the video so many times, I can tell you that he did not follow several [protocols] and so we are going to look into that,” Sousa said. He declined to specify which rules the driver broke until the internal review is complete.
Later Wednesday, school district spokesperson Russ Elek released a statement about the incident.
“It would be unfair to conclude without a thorough investigation that the actions of the bus driver were based solely on racial bias,” the statement says. “The bus driver did not follow GMT procedures for this type of scenario. And GMT reports that they have no procedures that would call for the removal of students off a bus.”
Over the summer, GMT and the district will work on how to educate “students, parents, and drivers around safe and respectful behaviors and expectations,” Elek’s statement read.
Sousa acknowledged both sides have work to do: “Were there certain actions by the students that they’re going to follow up on and look at? Absolutely. But on our end, we also have to follow up and look into our employees as well,” he said.
Sousa said operators receive diversity training annually, and Vermont State Police has trained all GMT operators on de-escalating rowdy situations.
“Definitely the steps weren’t taken to de-escalate that situation,” Sousa said. “It’s not like they don’t have the tools to handle situations like this.”
A handful of community members attended the Burlington School District’s Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Committee meeting Tuesday night and demanded repercussions for the driver, implicit bias training for all bus operators and justice for the students involved.
One parent, Erin Star Hughes, who has a son of African descent, said GMT should no longer transport Burlington students. Hughes, who had not seen the onboard video, said children can’t be blamed for the driver’s actions.
“They’re children at 3 p.m. They’ve just gotten out of school. They’re not really misbehaving. They just have all this energy,” Hughes said. “When a white boy does it, he’s just being a kid, but when a black kid does it, the cops get called.”
Mack told the committee she watched a video that a student took on the bus before the kids were kicked off. She had not seen the full onboard bus footage.
“They may not have been following exactly the bus rules at that moment … to that I cannot speak,” Mack said. “But what I can tell you for sure is that they were beautiful, playful children. That’s what I saw.”
“I would never want any kid thrown off any bus anywhere in Vermont,” Chittenden said. “This is our top priority.”
Smith at GMT said the company takes racism allegations seriously, but she hadn’t seen any proof that the driver discriminated against one racial group.
“This is a really diverse group of students. I can pretty much say without a doubt I don’t feel like it was racist,” Smith said. “It’s pretty clear that he dismissed what he felt was a group that was distracting. He wasn’t targeting students.”
Burlington School District spokesperson Russ Elek did not immediately return a phone call for comment.
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If I got kicked off of the bus when I was 10 for banging on windows and yelling after the driver told me to stop, my parents would have driven me back to the school immediately to make me apologize to the driver for my bad behavior. This doesn’t sound like a racist incident, even the parent of the kids that were kicked off seem to be backtracking now that they’ve actually seen video that contradicts what their kids told them immediately after the incident. This just sounds like kids that need a little better parenting.
Sounds like these kids are unfortunately being taught to play the Race Card early and often.
With the benefit of the video Mack’s children certainly seem to have been embellishing what happened or had words put in their mouths by their overreacting Mom.
Will any action be taken by the school against the one homophobic student who was shown on the video to be verbally deriding the bus driver now that that has come to light?
What’s being reported doesn’t seem to match up with Mack’s complaint, at all. Mack claims that every student ejected from the bus was a student of color, but it seems clear now that others have seen video of the incident that this was not accurate. Without having seen the video, it also sound like these kids were behaving poorly on a public bus. The driver should certainly have done something different than kick the students off, but at some point, these kids have to be listening to the bus driver as well.
GMT should be following up with the driver, and the school board should be working out a clear policy for dealing with kids misbehaving on our public bus system, but these parents Seven Days are interviewing should probably take a long look in the mirror as well. If their kids are part of a large group behaving poorly enough to get kicked off the bus, and then proceed to bang on the outside of the bus and shout homophobic slurs at the driver, mom and dad (or just mom) need to discipline their kids. Had I been thrown off of a bus at 10 years old, I’d have been driven back to the school immediately to apologize to the driver for acting like a little jerk, no matter how much I told mom and dad that the driver was in the wrong. These kids sound like the type that can do no wrong in their parent’s eyes, though, even though they’ve apparently altered the story to make it a racist incident (which, tbf, probably seems like a good idea to a child trying to get out of trouble if their parents are going to buy it).
Two big lessons coming out of this story.
First, it’s unfortunate that this issue went so viral before the facts came out because racism does exist, and incidents like the one suspected here do happen. Every time one of these stories turns out to be wrong, it gives the racism apologists ammunition to say that ALL such incidents are blown out of proportion.
Second, what the hell are GMT bus drivers doing kicking children, even rowdy children, off of school buses in the middle of routes? That’s not what school bus drivers do. You bring the kids to school, you write them up, and they get in trouble. You don’t threaten to call the cops and kick the kids off of the bus. If GMT wants to be the school bus, its drivers have to act like school bus drivers.
This is growing soooo tiresome. The white woman with the adopted black children crying “RACISM!!” from the rooftops? These loons are driving the Burlington school district into the ground. One woman says they are just excited because they just got out of school? You see people, the behavior is condoned by these “parents”. They don’t teach these children respect or how to behave. In fact, they are teaching the opposite. The 200 students who walked out of Edmunds for no reason should be suspended. Instead, their parents/guardians, faculty and staff, celebrate their braveness and the kids photos are splashed all over the news and social networks (the MOST important platform for kids). Wondering how many “likes” they got?? All the loons (indoctrinating teachers included) want “student voice”. Sorry loons, the students are idiots. Don’t believe me? Wait until this year’s standardized test scores come out, I predict the poorest performance in history. Time to get some sensible people in charge and get back to focusing on achievement instead of activism.
The saddest part of this is that these miscreant kids have no role models.
They are future recidivists who will never learn responsibility.
Tragic.
The poor bus driver, meanwhile, is the latest victim of the new culture of politically charged reverse racism.
God help these kids who learned from their “parents” that yelling “racism” 24/7 is the way to live a virtuous life.
My favorite part of this whole thing is how this woman thought she would be a champion for mistreated students and began to lead a crusade, and instead outed herself as a bad parent with video proof the whole distract/media has now seen.
Hi Stella – I don’t think GMT necessarily wants to be in the school bus business. BSD, being an urban district, doesn’t run buses the way suburban and rural districts do, leaving the local public bus operator (GMT) to fill in that gap. As a public operator, I would say that GMT has even more ability to kick passengers off their buses than an internal school bus program would. Those that choose to utilize GMT as a transportation option, children or adults, have the responsibility to act in a manner that doesn’t threaten fellow passengers, potentially damage the bus, or make a driver fearful of causing a problem on the road.
Rebecca Mack should publicly apologize. Every adult who defamed this man and judged before seeing the video should apologize. This type of behavior is common on many of the GMT after school buses. The bus taking students to the south end is so chaotic, disrespectful and out-of-control that my son stopped riding it home. He said that the way the children behave is so disrespectful that he didn’t want to be around it. It was giving him bad anxiety. The drivers are virtually helpless to do anything about it for the exact reason that this situation illustrates.
If GMT release the video footage; it will allow all to see what really happened.
child of african decent and kids of color………my black friends say they are just black people. they are in their mid 50’s to early 60’s. they don’t fall for all this race baiting. oopsie! we forgot to mention that white kids were also axed to leave the bus. we remembered when somebody called us out on it.
A lot more to this story than the abbreviated version and incomplete headline on Yahoo. I’d be willing to bet the driver was justified in actions and this whole thing is kids behaving badly. Yet again.
In response to all of you winners of the Nobel prize in parenting judging imperiously without all the facts, it’s ironic because isn’t that your problem with R. Mack?
You’ve assumed everything and issued your worst judgments based on your skewed biases.
For starters (not that it matters), her children are her natural born (looking at you Carson, openly displaying your racism right here for all to see).
I know Rebecca to be a stellar parent and leader in the community, much admired by all who know her personally.
She reacted as any Mama would when her babies were made unsafe by the irresponsibility of the adult in charge. Her crime is siding with her own. Who wouldn’t?
No matter what those children were doing, the bus driver was under contract to get those children home safely and he failed. The fault lies with him.
In response to all of you winners of the Nobel prize in parenting judging imperiously without all the facts, it’s ironic because isn’t that your problem with R. Mack?
You’ve assumed everything and issued your worst judgments based on your skewed biases.
For starters (not that it matters), her children are her natural born (looking at you Carson, openly displaying your racism right here for all to see).
I know Rebecca to be a stellar parent and leader in the community, much admired by all who know her personally.
She reacted as any Mama would when her babies were made unsafe by the irresponsibility of the adult in charge. Her crime is siding with her own. Who wouldn’t?
No matter what those children were doing, the bus driver was under contract to get those children home safely and he failed. The fault lies with him.
When we rode the bus in the 70s we were told to be respectful or we would be thrown off the bus and walk. I was loud and hyper one day and thrown off. 97 degrees out and 4 miles from home. No cell, southern California , desert with no shade. I was 11 and learned my lesson. My parents were upset, but with me not the bus driver.
Well. These comments are really letting everyones racism come shining through. No matter what, this bus driver is not innocent. GMT stated he broke protocol. Lets stop pretending hes a victim of anything.
@Opinionated
Who wouldn’t? responsible parents wouldn’t blindly side with their own. That is how garbage like this becomes a national story. These kids were behaving awful, they were dealt with, and this child raising children decided to throw a bomb into the whole thing. It’s so wildly irresponsible that if someone called CPT on her, just to give her a good scare, it would be well worth it.
Glad we’ve got an idiot that’s still going to scream ‘racists’ even after everyone that’s seen the footage has confirmed that racism was not a factor. Five dollars say her bratty kids got tossed off the bus.
Amazing how racist the “parents” accusing the bus driver are. What would Shakespeare say? lol.
White kids who were banging on windows were ejected yet the race baiters only say so called children of color got booted. Since when is white and it’s many shades not a color?
I appreciate that you know R Mack, and have some different views about her behavior because of that friendship, Opinionated, but it would probably help to look at this story from a neutral point of view before bashing those of us who don’t. Mack comes out of this looking very, very badly to just about everyone reading this. She was the one claiming that ALL of the children told to go were minorities, which has turned out to be a false claim. She was also claiming that the children were simply singing and clapping, which also appears to be a bit of a Trumpian stretch as well.
If Mack feels that her children were discriminated against because of the color of their skin, she’s well within her rights to turn the volume up to 11 and make this a national story. Unfortunately, though, it appears she didn’t bother to get her facts straight before escalating this situation, and now that it turns out her kids’ description of the event was missing some pretty important details (and downright untrue in one instance), she’s going to wind up looking like a pretty lousy parent. That’s certainly not how my parents, myself, or most of the parents I know would have handled this.
All we’ve got to go on when forming our opinion of Mack is this story, in most cases, and this story winds up making Mack look pretty poor. Instead of talking about why the Burlington school district isn’t providing monitors on public buses when they’re using them as a substitute for a school bus (so that this sort of thing never happens), we’re discussing the woman who cried wolf in a crowded theater because nobody was paying attention when she cried mouse.
One camera angle shows a white student who was kicked off the bus yell faggot! at the driver just before the bus pulls away. The LGBT community seems strangely silent on this. Perhaps the racial angle has scared them away.
Some people may not like what I’m about to say but it’s the truth. As a man of color in Vermont, I find it easy to go about my business without being harassed because this state is so white that 9.99 times out of 10, the criminal activity in this state is committed by white males. I rarely fit the description of a Vermont “perp”.
Sure, there’s racism here. There’s racism everywhere. But to pull the Race Card out for such a minor incident does a disservice to those who are actually suffering from racial injustice.
I was kicked off school busses when I was a kid up in Maine. Not because I was the only non white on the bus, but because I was being a little shit.
This whole thing boils down to parents teaching their children how to behave in public spaces.
A group of children were neglected, mistreated and endangered on their way home from school. Parents put their trust in a system that ABANDONED their children. It doesnt matter if your perspective is that they were misbehaving or playing, they are CHILDREN and adults should keep them safe. GMT admits that the driver acted against protocol, because what adult in their right mind turns children out on the street?!?!?
Now to reporting. The people who know exactly what happened on that bus have not been part of the conversation, they are minors and one adult (the driver). Sounds like Mack was reporting what her children told her.
Race. Just because a white kid or even a few white kids were also ejected does not prove that this is not a race-based incident. What is the most meaningful thing here to me, is that the children felt that they were targeted because of their skin color. The actions of this driver, whatever those actions entailed (we dont know because we cant see the video) made them feel targeted because of their skin color. And they are children. They dont have a lifetime of incidents to feel jaded by. GMT needs to hold the driver accountable for their actions and needs to seriously investigate their hiring and training practices.
My thoughts are with the children, I am so sorry this system failed to make them feel safe and respected:(.
Just a thought, worried, but if you’re that worried about the children being kept safe on a public bus on their way home from school, maybe you ought to be talking to the school district about providing a monitor to ensure their safety (not that it does any good, I’ve attempted it several times already). At the moment, the district is putting them (unsupervised) on buses being used by sex offenders with convictions involving minors. Check the sex offender registry if you don’t believe me…there’s a scumbag named Thompson that lives in Burlington that’s on the buses with these kids basically every day of the week. I’m sure he’s not the only one, he’s just the only one I personally know of. He’s got 2 convictions, involving a 13 year old and a 14 year old. I’ve contacted the city and state about it, but the state claims they can’t do anything about it because there’s basically no restrictions on sex offenders in this state. And we wonder why sex offenders from out of state are flocking to Vermont…
Bottom line for me is that the school district shouldn’t just be dropping kids on a public bus with inadequate supervision. Even if their reported behavior wasn’t enough reason to be screaming about a lack of adult supervision, the perverts they’re encountering on these buses should cause enough concern to make us talk to the school long and hard about this system.
Frankly, a district with taxes as ridiculously high as Burlington’s should be able to afford to get kids to and from school with some sort of supervision. That would solve soooo many problems.
“Just because a white kid or even a few white kids were also ejected does not prove that this is not a race-based incident.”
Um . . . yes, that’s pretty much exactly what it proves. The available facts are that a bunch of kids in the back of the bus were unruly and the driver kicked them all off. It seems that there are people who are determined that this is a racial incident know matter what the facts may show.
So…Vermont, how y’all liking that diversity you wanted so bad? Hmmm?
Laughing so hard at Rebeccas friend Opinionated right now; you must be flustered because youre making no sense. No, theres no irony in what we are doing in judging her because this is the third or fourth article about it thats come out, and it finally has, ya know, the facts that weve been waiting for. Thats why were commenting. Its what she should have done, rather than going to the media with her story before she knew if it was true.
I agree that the driver should face some repercussions if he is not supposed to have students that are making the ride unsafe for others exit the bus and he did that, BUT that is a far cry from being a racist. Not following protocol can lose you your job or get you suspended; being called a racist ruins your entire reputation and your personal life (as it should, if you are). Throwing that label around to ruin someones life because your kids were over the line and someone didnt handle it in the way you like isnt only not okay, its disgusting and she should be embarrassed by her actions. Its also extremely frustrating, because this is now the perfect incident for others to point to and say see, there is no racism when real incidents do occur, every day, all day.
Incidents like these further systemic racism in our society. If youre asking who wouldnt in this instance, its someone that wants a better future for their kids, rather than ignoring the issues that are occurring in their kids lives, and blaming them on others.
There is another point here that seems to be evident from the descriptions of the videos as reported:
The children were misbehaving and should be treated as such. I know when I rode the bus to high school there were 2 nights the driver pulled over for almost an hour until the principal showed up. 4 of the 5 that caused trouble did not afterward due to their parents correcting their behavior.
Our kids were always well behaved because we did not accept behavior like this, if they did misbehave they knew their would be consequences.
It is imperative we protect the safety of our children. To that end, the driver should have pulled over, called the police and the school, and parked on the road until the police arrived. As for the kids, it is equally imperative we teach our kids that misbehaving (which includes showing lack of respect to the driver) has real consequences. Each and every one of the kids misbehaving should be made to stay after school and ordered to write a sincere 2 page apology to the driver outlining what they did, why it was wrong, and how there actions might have adversely affected the driver. This should be a minimum of three days detention, this should not be fun, and each day should result in another draft apology until they get it right. This work should be done first alone, then in groups. The goal is to teach the kids that there are real, uncomfortable consequences for their actions.
This is where is gets a little tricky, Russell. There are paying customers on these buses using it as their way to and from work. People trying to get to jobs. People trying to get home to kids returning from school. People trying to make it to doctors appointments. These are not school buses, this is public transport. They need to be treated as such.
Obviously, kicking a 5-year old off of the bus and leaving them alone on the street is not the answer, but neither is pulling over until help arrives and taking the bus off of a schedule that many rely heavily on. This is the problem with the school district using the city’s public transportation as their way of busing kids to and from. The help should already be on the bus…if the district is going to put a kindergartner on a bus, they need to put supervision on that bus as well. They owe it to the kids, they owe it to the parents, and they owe it to everyone else on that bus.
@ Beste:
I agree with your post about the kids having to make a written apology to the bus driver, but everywhere the word “kids” appears in your post, add: “and adults who run as fast as they can to Facebook and the public media to publicly accuse a bus driver of racism before they even know the facts of what happened.”
Just a thought.
Looks like someone should get nominated for the Jussie Smollet victimhood award.