FOIC Clears New Haven school in Video Dispute, Parent Outraged

Earlier this month, the state’s Freedom of Information Committee (FOIC) ruled a New Haven public school and its superintendent to have committed no wrongdoing after the district was unable to provide a parent with bus monitor footage of an incident involving her child.

Kristen McDowell, the parent who filed the complaint, is not happy.

“I’m just disappointed with them [the FOIC], and the district, because they didn’t obtain it,” said McDowell in a conversation with Inside Investigator . “Somebody needs to find them in violation of not obtaining what they’re supposed to obtain!”

The incident occurred on December 23, 2021, when McDowell was notified by the school around 9 a.m. that her son was absent, despite the fact that McDowell’s son had made it on the bus that morning. McDowell’s son, who is autistic and had been non-verbal for two years at the time, was left on the bus after the bus driver and monitor failed to properly check the bus after it arrived at Nathan Hale School.

McDowell was immediately alarmed upon receiving the notification and said she rushed from work to Nathan Hale while her mother called up First Student, the bus company contracted by New Haven Public Schools. Making matters worse, McDowell said, was the fact that First Student, the district’s bus company, has an app that allows parents to track their child’s bus route, but that the tracker was not activated at the time. McDowell also said that the bus driver was non-responsive to the school’s attempts to communicate with him over the radio.

“I’m at work, I get the notification on my phone, I called my mother, she’s on the phone with First Student, I’m flying out the door because I’m trying to figure out where my child is,” said McDowell. “So as I’m fighting with the board, and I’m fighting with the school and I’m telling everybody to find my child, as I’m on my way to get to the school, they call me to say, ‘Hey Mom, we found the bus, he’s on his way back to school.’”

When McDowell reached the school, she said her son was visibly distraught.

“I walked in the school, my son sees me, he’s still crying,” said McDowell. “All he said to me, and this is the first time I heard him talk in two years, ‘No bus! Home!’”

Per the FOIC ruling and McDowell’s recollection of events, McDowell proceeded to request information from the school after the incident to no avail. McDowell eventually submitted a FOIA request on August 2, 2023, seeking to obtain a copy of her son’s full education file and video from the bus’s student safety camera of the incident.  The school immediately responded to her complaint, but she was dissatisfied with the fact that it did not include video of the incident, nor did her son’s education file include any documentation related to the incident.

“Anything that’s an incident is supposed to be held on file,” said McDowell. “If y’all don’t do proper documentation, then I think the state needs to come and get y’all as well, because how many other incidents have been thrown under the bus?”

As a result, McDowell filed her complaint to the FOIC on August 10, 2023. District personnel emailed McDowell on Sept. 19, 2023, to tell her that NHPS did not possess the video she requested, nor did the school maintain any documentation in his educational file in relation to the incident.

“Staff have conducted diligent searches of NHPS records with regard to your FOIA request,” read the email, as quoted in the ruling. “We understand that you have been provided with copies of responsive documents. We have not, however, found any video recordings of the incident described in your request. NHPS cannot locate any such video in its records. After diligent search of our records, we have not found any record of having received the video from the bus company.”

The ruling said that around the time of the incident, the district’s Director of Transportation at the time, Carl Jackson went out on leave and eventually retired, and a former Director, Teddi Barra, came out of retirement to serve as Interim Director. The ruling explained that Jackson was the one who requested the video from First Student, then went on leave, and as result, Barra never received it. McDowell was angered at the thought that the school may not have accessed the email server to check Jackson’s inbox after his leave was taken, though Justin Harmon, Communications Director for NHPS, said there was “sworn testimony” that the school did check his inbox.

“Any time we receive a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request, it is standard practice for us to utilize our information technology resources to access the email accounts of anyone in the district who might have sent or received an email with information concerning the incident at issue,” said Harmon. “If we utilize these resources and are unable to locate a document that is responsive to the request, that information would be provided in response to the request for information.”

The ruling outlined the steps school officials testified to have taken in an effort to retrieve the video; the district’s Chief Operating Officer at the time, Thomas Lamb, asked the district’s IT department to conduct a search, and the search failed to find any recording. McDowell testified that she had spoken with a school social worker who had claimed to have seen the video, and that First Student claimed to have sent it to Principal Tara Cass. She also testified that she was informed Barra had seen it. Cass testified that she had spoken with the social worker in question, who told her she never told McDowell that she had seen the footage.

“Nonetheless, it is found that the principal never received a copy of the video and that she never reviewed the video,” reads the ruling. “While the complainant believes, perhaps justifiably, that the respondents should have received and maintained the video and should have prepared and kept notes, reports, PPT records, and other records regarding the incident, it is found based upon the testimony of the respondents’ witnesses, that the video cannot be located despite the respondents’ various search efforts and that such other records do not exist.”

Harmon said that district personnel are “constantly reviewing” their “document retention procedures and making improvements to those policies and procedures in response to changing legal requirements and situations as they arise.”

McDowell testified in the FOIC hearings that her child had shown signs of trauma after the event, which McDowell said have still yet to fully subside. McDowell told Inside Investigator that her son refused to go on the bus after the incident, would wet his pants when taken on car rides, and would beg her to go home anytime he was driven anywhere. She said it was impossible to get him on the bus, a fact which she made the principal, student support services, and the school’s planning and placement team aware of. McDowell also said that she requested the school to provide her son therapy to help him overcome his fear of the bus to no avail.

McDowell explained that she needs to be at work at the same time her son needs to be at school and that Nathan Hale does not let students in the building if dropped off early. McDowell lives in Fair Haven while the school is located in East Shore, ensuring that walking is not a viable option either. McDowell shared that transportation is included in her son’s Individualized Education Plan ( IEP ), which she believes puts the onus of her son’s transportation on the school.

“You need to make it easier for me, but you’re making it harder for parents when we’re expressing our concerns,” said McDowell. “It seems like the district doesn’t pay attention to teachers, it doesn’t pay attention to the students, and it does not pay attention to its stakeholders at all.”

McDowell said her issues with her son’s bus drivers did not end there. After she succeeded in getting him back on the bus with a new driver, that driver proceeded to drop him off last one day instead of first, after she had explained the incident to the driver. This retriggered her son’s fear of the bus to the point where he missed school for a month, and she eventually called DCF for assistance in drafting a re-entry plan for her child, as she was worried the school would report her for educational neglect. Per NHPS’s Guidelines for Student Transportation Services , under its Transportation Guidelines for Students with Special Needs, the school reserves the right to report a parent to DCF for child neglect if they repeatedly fail to ensure that their child gets to school.

Ultimately, McDowell is not only angered by the school’s lack of proper documentation but is also upset with the fact that nothing appears to have changed regarding the school’s protocol to prevent another such incident from occurring. The bus driver, McDowell said, was simply given paid leave, retrained, and assigned to another bus. The bus, McDowell said, still doesn’t have a tracking app.

“They have not made any changes, and they continue to pay First Student,” said McDowell. “And I can say that because I’ve talked to the head of the Transportation Department, they’re not making any changes.”

Harmon said that the district works closely with First Student, and said that parents should contact First Student’s Transportation Director if they have any issues with the tracking app.

“We do want to let parents know that we work closely with First Student regarding its policies and procedures to protect student safety as our first priority,” said Harmon. “First Student has an excellent safety record, and a robust safety training protocol in place for its drivers and aides, and reinforces those protocols several times per year, at our request.”

McDowell said that ultimately, the incident has severed her trust with the district, and has made her reconsider moving districts. McDowell also said that no matter what school officials say or do, anytime she feels the district has endangered or done a disservice to her child, she’ll be right there to let them know her thoughts.

“I told them I’m not a quiet parent,” said McDowell. “I’m an old-school parent, if something’s going on, I’m at the school.”

The post FOIC Clears New Haven school in Video Dispute, Parent Outraged appeared first on Connecticut Inside Investigator .