Durham Revises Policies After Rochester Bus Driver's Arrest

Last month, Rochester's Board of Education members asked Durham School Services to restore their confidence in the transportation service after the arrest of bus driver Roseanne Stacho for first-degree retail fraud. 

Stacho was arrested on Sept. 21 at Parisian in Rochester Hills before she was set to pick up students at Stoney Creek High School. Police say she was caught trying to steal $543 in clothing from the department store. Her bus was parked in the store parking lot.

She has since resigned from her position as Durham bus driver; she was arraigned Tuesday, and a pretrial date was set for Oct. 26.

(See "School Board to Durham Leaders: How Will You Restore Our Confidence?") 

Monday evening the board shared a letter from Durham representatives providing the requested follow-up.

"To alleviate fear and enhance safety" Durham added the following procedures and controls in addition to the background checks already in place, according to the letter:

• To run a background check on any employee who transfers from one district to another. (Stacho had transferred from Birmingham to Rochester this school year.)
• To select a pool of 25 percent of Durham employees to conduct random background checks each year.
• To reaffirm the requirement for employees to check in when a driver is on a layover during the school days. (Stacho was on a layover at the time of her arrest.)
• To enhance the use of Durham's current technology to verify approved layover locations. (While some shopping centers around town are approved places for drivers to park, Parisian, where Stacho was arrested, was not.)

Durham representatives stated that had Stacho not resigned she would have been terminated for not reporting her February arrest in which she pled guilty to second-degree retail fraud. Durham employees are required to report any incident that would disqualify him or her.

Last spring, Rochester school leaders approved the outsourcing of transportation services, along with custodian and partial ground services, to save the district money. The school district's contract with Durham is for three years and is estimated to save the district $4.7 million.