Chattanooga’s Woodmore Elementary School had dismissed a bus driver’s concerns about onboard discipline before a fatal crash that killed six students in 2016, according to a long-awaited report released Tuesday by the National Transportation Safety Board.
In a 150-page assessment, investigators revealed that Johnthony Walker made multiple “discipline referrals” to the school, but those complaints were largely ignored.
“When he made several of those [discipline referrals], the school’s response was to tell him he can’t keep issuing so many referrals,” investigator Kenny Bragg said. “And that’s when we observed that he began doing things that were unsafe to control student behavior.”
Bragg confirmed previous reports that Walker would swerve the bus or slam the brakes to get kids to sit down. He also noted that Walker had very little training in student discipline.
However, the key finding by the NTSB is that Walker was speeding and on his cell phone when the bus crashed. He’s already been found guilty of criminally negligent homicide and sentenced to four years in prison.
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