Local & State Headlines

Bus monitors moved

• Monitors on a school bus for special-needs students are reassigned after a student is bruised during an incident.

Joshua Brown

ALBANY — A Dougherty County School System official confirmed Wednesday that five bus monitors on a bus on which an 8-year-old autistic girl was slapped on the opening day of the school year were reassigned to other positions in the school system a few days later.

The five employees are now working in special-needs classrooms as paraprofessionals. They were reassigned on Aug. 13, about six days after Bethany Hall, 8, was “pinched, slapped and bitten” on a school bus for special-needs students by another child on the bus, Deputy Superintendent Carlos Keith said Wednesday afternoon.

Bethany is autistic and cannot speak, and cannot communicate what happene to her, dawn Hall, Bethany’s mother, said. Hall said she is concerned because she does not know how her daughter was injured and school system authorities will not let her see a copy of the video tape of the incident.

A special-needs bus usually has “at least two bus monitors” on it, but Bethany’s bus had extra monitors because it was going through a bus hub where it picked up other students, Keith said.

Keith said the decision was made to reassign the bus monitors because they didn’t perform up to standards. They were also put on administrative leave as part of their disciplinary action, he said.

“Well, we felt that they did not hold their responsibilties that they were charged with,” he said. Because the incident happened on a bus, school system officials felt it was sufficient to reassign the monitors under whose watch the incident happened, Keith said,

The bus monitors who were reassigned were Jimmy Mullins, Connie Shorter, Daphne Peterson, Bettye Garner and Kenneth Burke. Keith did not know whether the bus driver, Irene Bynum, had been assigned to a different bus and the school system’s transportation director could not be reached Wednesday afternoon.

Keith did not know exactly how long the five had been bus monitors, but said each of them had been employed in that capacity for at least a year.

The School System Police Department is investigating the incident further, employees with the department have said.

More Headlines>>