School Fires Bus Driver for Giving Bush the Finger

In June, President George W. Bush visited Issaquah, Washington, to campaign for Rep. Dave Reichert. The two politicians were riding in a limousine on their way to attend a fundraiser at the Medina mansion when they passed by an entrance to the freeway from I-90. Several Issaquah School District buses full of students on their way back from the Woodland Park Zoo were stopped on the entrance ramp.

The students, their faces pressed against the windows, waved enthusiastically to the president as he passed by, and Bush waved back, smiling. But the driver of one of the buses wasn’t so enthusiastic with her acknowledgment of the commander-in-chief—she gave him the finger.

The president turned to Reichert and told him that the bus driver had flipped him off. A week later, Reichert called the school district to report the incident and he learned that the district was already investigating the driver’s actions because it had already been reported. The 43-year-old bus driver, whose name has not been reported, had actually bragged to other bus drivers about having flipped off the president.

District officials fired the bus driver in September. District spokeswoman Sara Niegowski said the gesture was "not at all appropriate modeling for students on the bus." Officials also said that this was not the first incident of concern for this driver, and she would have been fired for flipping anyone off with a bus full of students.

"This was part of a pattern of behavior with this particular bus driver, not an isolated incident," said Superintendent Janet Barry. "This incident has to do with the responsibility of an employee who is supervising students to act professionally and serve as a role model for appropriate behavior."

Barry said that she knows Congressman Reichert personally from when he worked as King County Sheriff, because they discussed school resource officers. Reichert called her as a courtesy to report the incident. "He never discussed his view or suggested what action he thought would be appropriate to take," Barry said. "He reported the incident, believing—rightly—that I would want to know this occurred, that as a steward of children and public resources, one of my employees had acted inappropriately in her job capacity."

According to Barry, the decision to terminate the bus driver was not motivated by any political reason, but rather because the obscene gesture was an inappropriate behavior for an adult supervising a busload of children. "If the bus driver had made the gesture to a driver who cut her off on a local road, we would have taken the same action," Barry said.

The bus driver has filed a union grievance against the district, claiming wrongful termination.