School Board Fired a 69-Year-Old Bus Driver for Going 1.4 Miles Off Route to Save a Family — Then His 26 Years of Handwritten Bus Logs Exposed Their Scheme

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Itzel Ocampo was three years old and weighed thirty-one pounds, and on Wednesday morning she was breathing on her own.

Lyle found that out from a nurse at a hospital in Oklahoma City, after an hour and forty minutes in his pickup and forty more in a waiting room. The nurse would not tell him anything at first. He was not family.

Then Graciela Ocampo came around the corner in a hospital gown and a borrowed sweatshirt, holding an IV pole, and saw him.

She did not say anything. She walked straight into him, IV pole and all, and put her forehead against his chest and held onto his coat with both fists.

Lyle stood very still. Verna had always said he hugged like a man being measured for a suit.

"They told me," Graciela said into his coat. "The doctor told me. Ten more minutes."

"You're all right now."

"Itzel was in the chamber two times. The oxygen chamber. Mateo, one time." She stepped back and wiped her face. She was thirty-one, small and quick, a cook at the nursing home in Anadarko. "I put the generator in the porch room because the cord did not reach outside. Rigo told me outside. Mateo told me outside. I said, it's only for one night. It's so cold."

"I know."

"I don't remember anything after midnight."

Rigo Ocampo got there at noon. He had driven straight through from a drilling site outside Midland, Texas, the minute his relief showed up, and he looked it. He shook Lyle's hand and held on to it with both of his.

"My son says you made the big girl squeeze a balloon," Rigo said.

Lyle almost smiled. That was how it had gone. He had laid Graciela on her side on the bus floor and wrapped her in the emergency blanket. He had carried Itzel out of the house gray and limp and barely breathing, and he had fitted the little mask over her face and shown Wren Kuykendall how to squeeze the bag.

Every three seconds. Watch her chest. One, two, squeeze. Don't stop till I tell you.

Then he had driven 1.4 miles of frozen gravel back to the highway with the windows cracked and the heater roaring, counting out loud, while a fourteen-year-old girl kept a three-year-old alive in the seat behind him. The ambulance from Anadarko met them at the corner of 2610 at 7:16.

"Wren did good," Lyle said. "Wren did real good."

The letter was in his mailbox when he got home that night. It had been hand-delivered, not mailed. Brent's signature was at the bottom.

NOTICE OF RECOMMENDATION FOR TERMINATION OF SUPPORT EMPLOYEE.

It was two pages long. It said that Transportation Director Brent Kowalczyk would recommend to the superintendent and the Board of Education of Wolf Bluff Public Schools that the employment of Lyle W. Haskins be terminated for cause. It listed the causes with numbers, as if a lawyer had written it.

1. Unauthorized deviation of 1.4 miles from an approved bus route.
2. Leaving eleven (11) students unattended in a running vehicle for approximately six (6) minutes.
3. Transporting non-students, including persons in medical distress, on a district vehicle without authorization.
4. Willful insubordination, to wit, refusal of a direct order from the Transportation Director.

At the bottom, it said that under Oklahoma law, as a support employee with more than one year of service, he was entitled to a hearing before the board.

Lyle read it twice at the kitchen table. Then he called his daughter.

Joleen worked nights in the emergency room in Lawton. She picked up on the first ring. She always did now, ever since her mother.

"Daddy? I saw it on Facebook. Are you okay? Half of Caddo County is calling you a hero."

"The other half signs the checks."

He read her the letter. She was quiet for a while.

"Daddy, you're sixty-nine," she said gently. "You've got your Army retirement. You've got the house paid off. You could just let it go. Retire. Tell them to keep their bus."

"And then what?"

"Then you rest. You've earned it."

Lyle looked at the window over the sink. Verna's African violets were still on the sill. He had kept them alive for three years without having any idea what he was doing.

"Jo, I'm not fighting for the job," he said. "If I let them write it down that I was wrong this morning, the next driver who sees an empty bus stop is going to drive right on by."

On Thursday morning, Orville Teel, a seventy-one-year-old substitute driver, took Route 3 in Bus 4 because Bus 7 was "out of service."

Four miles south of town, with nineteen children aboard, Bus 4's engine coughed twice and died on the shoulder of the state highway in eleven-degree wind. It took the district an hour and ten minutes to get another bus there. Two of the little ones were crying from the cold by the time it came.

Later that morning the Wolf Bluff Public Schools Facebook page put up a post. It was signed by Transportation Director Brent Kowalczyk.

This morning's breakdown is one more reminder that our aging bus fleet is no longer safe or reliable for our kids. Two incidents in three days. The Board will consider a long-term transportation solution at the March 9 regular meeting. Our children deserve better.

Lyle read it on his phone, sitting in his truck outside the feed store.

Two incidents. Brent was counting Tuesday. He was counting a little girl breathing again as a fleet failure.

Lyle had driven Bus 4 on activity trips more times than he could count. He had written it up in December for a cracked mirror bracket, and nothing else, because there had been nothing else wrong with it.

He looked at the time on the post. It had gone up at 9:02 a.m.

Bus 4 had broken down at 7:05. Two hours was not much time to write a post that sounded that finished.