Imagine for a moment that you are the adoptive parent (very recently having accomplished the adoption after three years of fostering the child) of a child with a background of profound abuse and neglect in their family of origin. Imagine that for the last three years you have engaged in three different types of therapy with them, and helped write an IEP to place them in a special program designed to meet the needs of severely emotionally disturbed children.
Now imagine that the child gets a new bus driver. The new driver brings your child home an hour late. The child comes home on the first day reporting that the children asked the driver to turn down the music, but that the driver responded by turning it up. Your child reports that suddenly there are teenagers on the bus and that one of them gets into a shouting name-calling match with a friend/classmate of your child. When the bus driver moves the friend/classmate to the front of the bus to sit next to your child, your child lets the driver know that you have instructed your child (for very, very, very good reasons) not to sit next to boys on the bus. The driver tells your child, "Your mother is not driving the bus and she is not the boss on the bus." A teenaged girl takes your child's backpack and places it behind the driver. Your child comes home very unhappy and confused. The other children on the bus are standing up on the bus and are very agitated.
The next day your child comes home sobbing and tells you that on the ride home the bus driver told her "shut the hell up, look outside and enjoy the ride." Your child is so frightened that she says she can't ride the bus anymore.
Well, if it were my child (and it is) there would be a big dust-up involving formal letters of complaints until I was assured that this driver would never again drive my child or her friends/classmates anywhere again.
