Video: School bus driver ‘gambling with the kids’ lives’ plows through Illinois flood

An Illinois school bus driver was caught plowing through floodwater on the way to school Wednesday morning, as seen in a video posted to Facebook.

Floodwater in the intersection reached the hood of the school bus, and the water nearly reached the bottom of the stop sign, the video and photo posted by Trisa Ross show.

“I was like, ‘Oh my god, it’s going! It’s going through!” Ross said, according to WQAD. “All the other cars and semis were turning around. The school bus driver was going through it. I just couldn’t believe it.”

The Monmouth-Roseville School District found out about the video on Facebook at about 11 a.m. Wednesday, according to a memo from Superintendent Ed Fletcher. That was about 2.5 hours after the video was posted.

The video shows the bus “going through high, standing water at the intersection of 11th Street and 11th Avenue in Monmouth, Illinois,” the memo says.

“I said, ‘Is that our bus?’” Fletcher said, according to Our Quad Cities. “My second question was, ‘Were there kids on the bus?’”

There were student on the bus, he said, and they were headed to Lincoln Elementary School, the station reported.

“You don’t want any kids on a bus in a situation like this, but especially our young ones,” Fletcher said, according to Our Quad Cities. “That made it even more concerning.”

“You’re gambling with the kids’ lives,” Ross said, according to the station. “There’s a lot of concerned parents right now and upset parents.”

Fletcher wrote in the memo that both he and the director of transportation investigated, and “it was determined that the incident is not acceptable behavior for any bus driver.”

“All drivers of vehicles know the dangers of driving through standing or running water,” Fletcher said. “We would have expected the driver would have applied that knowledge and followed their training.”

Fortunately, no students were injured, and no floodwater got into the bus, he said.

This incident will be handled as per the district’s policy, according to the memo.

“We here at Monmouth-Roseville take our student safety very serious and we will use this occasion to reinforce our expectation of student safety to all of our bus drivers before our students return to school in August,” the memo says.

This story was originally published May 30, 2019 at 10:39 AM.