DeHart Addresses Bus Complaints Before West Deptford School Board

Amid complaints of bus drivers ordering students off at the wrong stops and excessively long routes, the West Deptford school board went straight to the source Monday night, bringing in representatives from to talk about the situation.

School board President Christopher Strano said it was primarily a concern of student safety, especially regarding substitute bus drivers, that prompted the board to ask the company to speak publicly.

“We want to know if there’s a policy or something in there that’s going to prevent something like this from ever happening again within our district,” he said.

DeHart CEO Dennis Noon said the latest incident is still under investigation by the company, though the driver in the incident the board members referred to has been suspended from the route and pulled out of driving within the district.

“I can’t say for sure exactly what happened,” he said. “I’m getting conflicting stories from the driver and the office.”

Still, Noon said the company’s policy is spelled out to drivers, which includes bringing students back to their school in some situations, and those drivers should be in contact with the office dispatch if there are questions about a route.

Strano and other board members pressed Noon as to what specific policies are laid out, given parents’ concerns about what’s happened, both recently and through the school year thus far, given Monday night wasn’t the first time parents have railed against DeHart.

Not even a week into the school year, superintendent Kevin Kitchenman took time out from a board meeting that left some students on a route until 5 p.m.

More recently, John Hayden criticized the bus company for a separate incident, also involving a substitute driver. In that case, Hayden’s son, who has food allergies, was nearly bumped from an assigned seat on his bus because a second DeHart employee was in the seat and initially refused to move.

“While I’m extremely proud of my 7-year-old for taking a stand against two adults…the adults should’ve known better,” he said at the Sept. 26 meeting. “There is clearly a miscommunication in DeHart.”

Board member Lisa Eckley questioned whether there should be more done to reinforce the company’s polices.

“Is there a training manual, is there something posted on the bus?” she asked. “It shouldn’t be left to bus driver judgment at all.”

Eckley also asked Noon if calls back to the DeHart office by drivers out on routes were logged; he said they are not logged or recorded.

Strano later asked if there was anything the board could do, given the complexity of bus schedules and parent requests for flexible routes.

"We’re running almost a metro system," he said.

That aside, Strano said the seriousness of the most recent incident seems grounds for firing the driver, rather than just suspension.

Noon said that's the likely outcome in this situation, though he hesitated to say that definitively. He reiterated his points about company policy, and Noon said he could provide the board with the written version at some point after the meeting.

Several parents spoke after Noon’s public talk with the board, mostly with criticism of DeHart.

Mary Lopez said she wanted to hear more specifics from the bus company.

“I thought that was a really poor response on DeHart’s part,” she said. “They really didn’t answer any questions about safety.”

While she said she appreciated the school board moving to try to resolve the problems that have cropped up so far, Lopez said she hoped the representatives from DeHart would do more to explain to parents and students what they’re doing as a company to improve the situation; whether that’s laying out policies for everyone to see, or holding assemblies to explain their solutions, given the serious safety concerns.

“Be willing to do whatever it takes–that’s what I want to see from them,” Lopez said.