Family Of Frankfort Girl Killed By School Bus Files Wrongful Death Suit

FRANKFORT, IL — The family of 6-year-old Jenna Menias has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against Lincoln-Way High School District 210 and Frankfort School District 157-C after she was fatally hit by a school bus last month.

Jenna was struck and killed on Sept. 8, just seconds after being dropped off on her street, according to the law firm Corboy & Demetrio, which is representing the family.

Jenna was a first-grade student at District 157-C's Grand Prairie Elementary in Frankfort. District 157-C has a contract with Lincoln-Way Community High School District 210 for transportation services of its students.

“Districts 210 and 157-C had every opportunity to prevent this unimaginable tragedy from happening to Jenna and they failed her and the Menias family at every turn,” Dan Kirschner, who is the attorney for the family, said in a news release.

“As this complaint explains, safeguard, upon safeguard, upon safeguard were consciously disregarded not just in real time by the driver, but by two school districts charged with the responsibility of putting the safety of this child first,” Kirschner added.

According to Kirschner, several weeks before Jenna's death, her mom had expressed concern to the school district that Jenna was being dropped off alone, hundreds of feet from her house, on the opposite side of the house without any sidewalks or crosswalks. She had demanded a change.

In an email obtained by the family's attorney, the district denied her request. Jenna’s mother had also made the same request of the district in 2022 relating to her son’s transportation. Likewise, the district, in an email, denied that request, Kirschner said.

The lawsuit states that both districts knew that Aberdeen Drive, the street Jenna lived on, was a dead-end street extending from Harlem Avenue. The bus was required to eventually turn around after passing the intersection of Aberdeen Road and Dover Circle and return back toward Harlem, with its passenger-side door on the same side as the Menias home.

However, on the day she died, Jenna was dropped off unaccompanied from the school bus on the north side of Aberdeen Road, the lawsuit states. She was crossing Aberdeen Road when she was struck by the bus.

Before Sept. 8, the lawsuit states that District 210 had a routine of dropping off students on the route directly in front of their homes, after the dead-end turn, if students' parents weren't present when the bus first passed.

According to the lawsuit, the driver, who is employed by District 210, was a substitute who had only recently gotten his school bus license in July. He had never driven Jenna's route before.

Girl Hit Seconds After Getting Off Bus

Onboard video of the bus, which was obtained by the law firm, shows that Jenna was off the bus and in plain sight in front of the bus in the roadway when the bus driver, without using his exterior mirrors or looking out the front windshield, proceeded forward, striking Jenna, according to the law firm.

The video also shows the driver driving the bus while looking down at a piece of paper in his right hand, the firm said.

“Not only was Jenna’s death entirely preventable, but it was also entirely foreseeable when an inexperienced and clearly inattentive substitute driver is put behind the wheel of a
school bus filled with 5-, 6-, and 7-year-olds, to drive an unfamiliar route with a drop-off routine that the districts were aware was unsafe,” Kirschner said.

The lawsuit also discusses an internal email that was written hours before Jenna's death by District 210's Director of Transportation about that day being a "challenging afternoon," and that several drivers had called off.

"We discovered, that just hours before Jenna was killed, an internal email with the subject line 'Challenging afternoon' was written by District 210’s Director of Transportation lamenting that they have had a lot of late call offs from drivers, and that a department staffing shortage 'makes a challenging day—worse,'" Kirschner said. "This lawsuit was brought by the Menias family to get answers, to hold the districts accountable, and, most of all, to make sure that their worst nightmare never happens to another family."

The lawsuit was filed Sept. 22 in Cook County, as that is where Jenna died at a hospital.