#NYC schools watchdog ignored bus driver safety issues: lawsuit

The city schools watchdog quashed investigations into alleged corruption at the Office of Pupil Transportation — then canned the whistleblower who sounded the school bus alarm, according to a lawsuit.

Alexandra Robinson, who was fired as OPT executive director in October 2019, says she for years flagged suspected violations by companies who train and certify school bus drivers, only to see the Special Commissioner of Investigation quickly nix at least four probes.

OPT officials and SCI allegedly ignored Robinson’s 2015 warnings about Bus Drivers R Us, a training school accused of illegally selling phony bus driver certifications which once claimed to have conducted road test evaluations of 50 drivers in a single day, Robinson charged in her Manhattan Federal Court lawsuit against the DOE.

“There is absolutely no way that 50 drivers could be given … road tests today within the time frame allotted,” Robinson told SCI in an email.

Robinson says she also told then-OPT safety director Paul Weydig about drivers who were not properly fingerprinted, interviewed or vetted — only to see the investigator hired to do background checks bypassed, and his computerized signature used to rubber stamp more than 700 bus driver and attendant certifications, she charges in the legal filing.

The result was drivers “with serious criminal records” hired to drive school buses, Robinson claimed.

Weydig left the DOE June 7, after months of allegedly collecting two paychecks simultaneously from the city and a Long Island school district.

Robinson also reported to higher ups when she found hundreds of confidential documents, including driver DMV records and bus driver certificates, in a trash bin near Weydig’s desk, she claimed.

By 2018, irregularities with bus-driver certifications were still an issue, with Robinson blowing the whistle to SCI on invalid paperwork, faked DMV letters, and other fraud.

But instead of following up, SCI went after Robinson, confiscating her hard drive and accusing her of having underlings drive her to the airport and of mismanaging a $9 million GPS bus-tracking initiative.

The publicly released SCI reports about Robinson were “more than retaliation and hate — it is slander … and will tarnish my career,” Robinson told her bosses in an email included in court papers.

Robinson claims she was retaliated against for reporting the school bus driver training violations — and that accusations she mismanaged the new GPS technology was just a “pretext” for firing her.

Robinson also said the airport trips were false accusations, and she has “ample evidence” she transported herself.

The state Attorney General’s Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation both reached out to Robinson on the school bus driver training violations, she claims. It’s unclear if either took any action.

SCI declined to comment on the allegations, and cases, cited by Robinson in her lawsuit.

“We take the termination of an employee very seriously. We will review the lawsuit,” DOE spokeswoman Danielle Filson said.

Additional reporting by Susan Edelman