School bus company employee claims she was fired for reporting safety issues on Manchester, Kearsarge buses

Jeff Faughender/AP photo, file
Published: 01-02-2025 1:06 PM
Modified: 01-02-2025 2:34 PM |
A school bus company employee says she was fired for speaking up about safety issues on Kearsarge Regional and Manchester School District buses, according to a lawsuit filed in federal court last month.
Alison Jones, a corporate employee at the bus contracting company Student Transportation of America, said she repeatedly told superiors throughout the summer and fall of 2023 that the buses they were operating were overcrowded, but that her complaints were ignored until she was ultimately fired last January.
“From Ms. Jones’s perspective, it appeared that STA management only cared about being able to keep their contracts with various school districts, and did not care if they violated the law, and did not care if they endangered students by doing things that were unethical and/or unlawful,” Jones’ lawyers wrote in her legal complaint.
A representative for the company, which is based in New Jersey, declined to comment, citing company policy on pending litigation.
The lawsuit comes as bus driver shortages continue to plague school districts across the state.
It also follows a publicized dispute last year between the Manchester School District and Student Transportation of America. Weeks into the school year, the bus company informed the school district that it could only cover a quarter of the district’s routes, rather than the half administrators said they had anticipated, NHPR reported at the time.
Andrew Toland, the executive director of communications for the district, said on Thursday that the district was not previously aware of the lawsuit but that it no longer works with Student Transportation of America. Toland said the district’s legal team has been alerted and declined to comment further.
John Fortney, the superintendent of the Kearsarge Regional School District, which still contracts with the company, said that his district was aware of overcrowding issues but that they were addressed before any bus traveled over capacity.
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“Routes have been heavily modified to prevent this from happening again,” he wrote in a statement.
Neither school district is named as a defendant in the lawsuit.
Jones, 62, a North Sutton resident, said she was hired by Student Transportation of America as an operations manager in 2018, before being promoted to the position of area general manager in 2022.
Jones said she began to raise concerns in July or August of 2023 when she learned that Manchester was anticipating 17 to 20 buses for the upcoming school year but that her company only had 13 available.
Jones said that the lack of buses resulted in students in Manchester riding in the aisles, which she described as a “significant safety issue.” A video posted to Facebook from this period shows a packed bus.
Later that fall, Jones said she told her supervisor that buses in Kearsarge were similarly overcrowded.
Jones said she also raised concerns in both Manchester and Kearsarge about the credentials and training of some bus drivers.
She contended that some new drivers were allowed to get behind the wheel before their background checks were completed. In one case, Jones said she removed a Kearsarge driver from his route because his background check remained in progress.
Jones said she was fired on Jan. 16, 2024 during a Microsoft Teams meeting with one of the supervisors to whom she had made complaints. She said she was told the company was “going in a different direction.”
In addition to suing Student Transportation of America under New Hampshire’s whistleblowers’ law, Jones is also claiming that the company discriminated against her on the basis of her gender and age.
Jeremy Margolis can be contacted at jmargolis@cmonitor.com.