Should Hawaii Education Officials Do More To Ensure Safe Bus Drivers?
It was a parent’s nightmare.
A school bus with four middle-school children in it, swerving down Kauai’s Olohena Road near the Puuopae Road junction, according to police reports.
When police caught up with the bus, they signaled for the driver to pull over. But first, he sideswiped a trailer and a boat parked on the side of the road.
Police arrested the 74-year-old driver, Lawrence Koth, . He later passed a breathalyzer test, but charges are still pending.
Particularly troubling: It was only about 7:20 in the morning.
The students didn鈥檛 report any injuries and were later taken to school on another bus, but the incident prompted Civil Beat to take a closer look at what the DOE does to vet the people responsible for transporting roughly 35,000 of Hawaii鈥檚 students to and from school.
Last year, a scathing found rampant mismanagement and inadequate staffing, among a plethora of other problems in the DOE鈥檚 student transportation branch. Such shortcomings caused school bus costs to nearly triple to $74 million between 2006 and 2012.
One problem detailed in the audit was the way that DOE staff dealt with bus contractors鈥 driver lists.
Contractors are supposed to submit rosters with drivers鈥 names 鈥 along with their driver’s license numbers and records of a clean criminal history 鈥 annually. But most of the contractors that the state auditing office looked into last year didn鈥檛 provide rosters, and none had a complete one.
The limited documentation raises questions about children鈥檚 safety and lax oversight by the DOE. For all practical purposes, the job of keeping dangerous drivers off of school buses is left to the contractors that it hires.
DOE Assistant Superintendent for School Facilities and Support Services Ray L鈥橦eureux, in an email to Civil Beat, emphasized that drivers are employed by individual contractors and not the department. Much of the vetting happens through the contractors themselves and the Department of Transportation, which conducts annual criminal and traffic record background checks of the drivers because they hold commercial driver鈥檚 licenses.
The DOE does engage in a one-time background check on each new driver. And when a driver is involved in an incident, the department has the school bus company conduct a 鈥渃omprehensive investigation鈥 into the incident and then another round of background checks on the driver, including drug testing, L鈥橦eureux explained.
But the DOE does not do its own investigation.
The department can also randomly request driver records from contractors, L鈥橦eureux added.
The DOE intends to hold each bus driver more accountable, he said, pointing to recent legislation that gives the department more freedom in how it deals with contractors.
L鈥橦eureux declined to say how the department is responding to concerns in the audit that it doesn鈥檛 employ staff capable of properly evaluating the companies鈥 bus driver rosters.
The audit prompted Civil Beat to request copies of the driver rosters from the DOE last November. Initially, the department denied Civil Beat鈥檚 request, reasoning that drivers are hired through private bus companies rather than the DOE.
It wasn鈥檛 until Civil Beat cited the audit that the department provided the rosters it had on file, more than a month after the original request.
Included in those documents is a roster from August 2012 that list Koth, the recently arrested Kauai bus driver, who was driving for Akita Enterprises. The roster says Koth’s criminal record was last cleared in December 2011. Civil Beat checked court records and found no criminal cases or civil lawsuits on file.
But, as the State Auditor pointed out, there鈥檚 no way of knowing whether the rosters are complete. The next round of rosters is due Aug. 30.
Akita Enterprises President Wendy Akita told Civil Beat that Koth鈥檚 arrest marks the first incident of its kind for the school bus company, which employs roughly 100 drivers.
Akita called Koth an 鈥渆xemplary employee鈥 who appeared to be behaving normally when he checked in with his supervisor the morning of the accident. Drivers, she said, check in with their supervisor at the base yard every school day.
After the incident, Koth was suspended from his job indefinitely, although he could be reinstated if he鈥檚 cleared by the court and passes a transportation department physical that Akita described as rigorous.
A Kauai County spokeswoman said Koth is expected to appear in court Sept. 18. While he failed the initial field sobriety test at the scene of the accident, he later passed a breathalyzer test. The results of a test that will reveal whether he was driving under the influence of illegal or prescription drugs is not yet available.
