Bus driver fired after Pittsburgh student slept through stop, was found at bus garage
A bus driver with W.L. Roenigk Inc. was fired Thursday after a Pittsburgh Public Schools student was found at the company’s bus garage in McKees Rocks after sleeping through her stop.
Parents of the child, a student at Pittsburgh Beechwood PreK-5, reported her missing when she didn’t get off the bus with her siblings after school, PPS spokeswoman Ebony Pugh said.
Police found the student at the bus garage, Pugh said. The student had fallen asleep on the bus, she said.
“The driver broke the golden rule,” said Josh Orris, manager at Buffalo Township-based Roenigk. “Child checks are the utmost important job and failing to do it calls for immediate termination.”
The male driver, Orris said, was new to the company after being hired this summer.
Orris planned to meet with managers from each of the company’s garages Friday “to make sure that nothing like this ever happens again.”
Roenigk operates 10 garages in the Pittsburgh region. The company services 25 districts in Allegheny, Armstrong, Butler and Westmoreland counties.
Tawnya Panizzi is a TribLive reporter. She joined the Trib in 1997. She can be reached at tpanizzi@triblive.com.
Remove the ads from your TribLIVE reading experience but still support the journalists who create the content with TribLIVE Ad-Free.