Edmonton bus company swamped with messages of support for driver

An anonymous school bus driver and the unidentified boy who clouted him in the head with a duffel bag have become the focus of national sympathy on the one hand, and scorn on the other.

The company that employs the driver said Thursday it has been deluged over the past few days with messages of support, enough to fill a three-ring binder.

"We started getting so many emails of support for the driver … comments just loading up our Facebook page, and on the CBC website, we decided to just start printing them out," said Laura Doroshenko, operations manager for Cunningham Transport.

She said the driver, who hasn't spoken publicly about the incident, doesn't often use the Internet but wanted to see the messages, so the company printed and compiled them all.

She said the messages and phone calls have come from across Canada.

It's a story that started out badly for the driver and the company.

Last weekend, Edmonton news outlets posted a cellphone video shot from the back of the bus. On the video, shot on May 25, the driver stopped the bus, tossed a boy's backpack out the door and escorted the boy off the bus, 10 blocks from his stop. He then drove away while other students shouted in alarm.

That video prompted outrage and led the Edmonton Catholic School Board to call for the driver to be fired.

"When the first video went out he was looking like quite the bad guy," Doroshenko said.

What no one but the driver knew at the time was, he had installed his own dashboard camera that same morning.

Doroshenko said that earlier that day, when the bus arrived to pick the boy up for school, the boy wanted to board with his duffel bag and hockey stick. Board policy prohibits large items from being taken on buses, Doroshenko said, so the driver refused.

The boy's father argued with the driver, who finally relented and allowed the boy to bring the bag onto the bus. The hockey stick had to stay behind.

That afternoon, on the ride home, the dashboard camera recorded what happened at the front of the bus. On that video, the Grade 8 student with the hockey bag walked toward the front door to get off the bus, and got angry when the driver began to pull away without letting him off. He then swung his duffel bag and hit the driver in the side of the head.

The dashboard video, which has no sound, also shows the other boy, the one who was escorted off the bus. It clearly captures what the cellphone video did not: scenes where the boy repeatedly punched and kicked a smaller child and made many rude and threatening gestures at the driver.

Doroshenko said once that video was made public, people's opinions changed.

"It's flip-flopped quite a bit," she said. "I think people are looking at it and they're realizing that some of these kids are getting out hand. It is hard to discipline them, because there are so many restraints on board officials and bus drivers, definitely.

"It has struck a chord with a lot of people. Why? Because they're dealing with it, or they have dealt with it."

The school board called the company and the driver, Doroshenko said, to apologize for initially calling for the man to be fired.

She said she hopes the incident has made people more aware of the behaviour problems that bus drivers deal with every day.