School bus monitor wins $10,000 for disarming a student

For exemplifying what it means to be a great union member, a school bus assistant and AFT member in West Virginia has placed second as a Unions Power America Hometown Hero, in an awards program sponsored by Union Plus, the member benefits arm of the AFL-CIO. 

The winner, Becky Turner, received the award for disarming a student on her school bus. Turner is a transportation assistant for special needs students in Kanawha County. She started her career with the school district as a custodian, has been a union member for 10 years, and for about a year has been a member of Education West Virginia, a statewide merger of the AFT and the National Education Association. 

Her job, Turner says, is to get her students on the bus safely and keep them secure for the entire trip between school and home. 

It seemed like a fairly normal day this past January, Turner recalls in a video by Union Plus. But something felt “off” in the way a certain student was behaving. As she recalled in an interview, he told her, “Miss Becky, I had a bad day.” But the boy seemed almost too calm—so she walked to the front of the bus and spotted him sitting right behind the school bus driver with a gun in his hand. 

She didn’t stop to think, placing herself between the student and the other kids. 

She said: “Give me that.” 

Fortunately, he handed her the gun. It was loaded. Turner put on the gun’s safety and ejected the magazine. She told the school bus driver that they needed to go back to the school, which was less than a mile away. “I was in shock,” she says. But just a bit later, she got right back on the bus and accompanied the kids home. She took the next day off and was back at work on the bus the following day.

“I love my job, and I love every child I have ever worked with,” Turner wrote in applying for the award. “I would do anything I possibly could to make their lives even the slightest bit better.”

Kanawha County, which includes the state capital Charleston, is the most populous county in West Virginia. Turner describes her bus route around the Charleston area as somewhat low-income, and with a fair number of students living under child protective custody. Her main motivation on the job besides safety, she says, is that she wants her charges to feel love.  

“Her first thought was, I have to protect all the kids on the bus, and I have to protect this child too,” EWV Co-President Dale Lee said in a statement praising Turner.

“Education West Virginia is incredibly proud of Becky and honored to have a Union Plus Hometown Hero as our member,” added EWV Co-President Kristie Skidmore.

Calm-down tents

Turner’s idea for what to do with some of the prize money? A “recombobulation station,” which would consist of mobile calm-down tents for large school or community events. The idea is to provide at least a few minutes of peace for people who become overexcited or upset, so they can pull themselves together and go back to the event. She planned to use some of her prize money to develop the calm-down station and some to buy school supplies for the classrooms of the kids on her bus route. 

The award came to Turner as a complete surprise. Her supervisor had contacted her husband and her parents, making sure they were all in the room for the presentation. “It was a really special day,” she says. And as soon as they heard that Turner planned to buy school supplies with some of her prize money, the Union Plus representatives whisked her off to go shopping on the union’s tab. 

“The special needs classrooms need extra supplies,” Turner says, adding that her students, most of whom are nonverbal, require specialized materials that the school budget might not cover.

One day off

Despite the trauma of that day, Turner considers herself to be doing all right. Sometimes on the bus, she’ll read her students a book or play some music. At the bus stops, she often chats with their parents. 

“I don’t see myself as a hero,” she says. “I see myself as someone who cares deeply about my kids.”

After that fateful day, Turner—whose school bus driver husband is also an AFT member—took the next day off work. All her students seem to have come through the incident unaffected, she says, except for one boy who told her he felt scared. The day she went back to work, he gave her a picture he drew, along with a note that said, “I love you, Miss Becky. Thank you.” 

This past summer, Turner started planning her business to provide calm-down tents for people who feel overwhelmed, dizzy or just needing to rest in a quiet, darkened place during large school or community events. Acknowledging that school support staff often need to be the calm presence in a chaotic situation, Turner takes her job responsibilities seriously. “We pay a lot of attention to the world around us,” she says. Students rely on her for that vigilance and steady presence.

“They know that they are safe when they’re on my school bus,” Turner says in the video. “I am their safe place. It is my goal to treat the kids on my bus as my own kids.”

[Annette Licitra]