Off The Record

The New Director Fired Me For “Attitude” After 28 Years Driving Route 14. At The Board Meeting, A State Trooper Stood Up Holding My Notebooks

Published on October 31, 2026

The note was taped to the steering wheel of Bus 22 when I climbed on at 5:52 on a Tuesday morning in September. Yellow sticky note, block capitals, the handwriting of a man who had never been late for anything in his life because he had never had to drive a ridge road in fog.

SEE ME BEFORE ROUTE. T.W.

I peeled it off, folded it in half and put it in my coat pocket. Then I did my walk-around, the same one I’d done every school morning since 1998. Tires, lights, stop arm, crossing gate, mirrors, the back emergency door that sticks if you don’t lean on it with your hip. I wrote the mileage in my notebook. I wrote the temperature, forty-eight degrees, and the word “fog,” and I underlined it twice.

Then I went inside to see Trey Wakefield.

The Man With the Tablet

I’m sixty-two. I’ve driven a school bus for Sugar Valley Local Schools in eastern Ohio for twenty-eight years, twenty-six of them on Route 14, which runs out State Route 39, up and down the ridge roads and back into town by 7:35 if God and the gravel trucks cooperate.

My husband, Wayne, is a retired lineman for the power company. He says I have the patience of a fence post and the memory of an elephant, and he means both as compliments. Mostly.

Trey Wakefield became our transportation director in July. He was thirty-five, came from a big suburban district outside Columbus, and arrived with a tablet in a leather case and a slideshow called “Route Optimization: Doing More With Less.” The board hired him because our old director, Sid Tennyson, retired after thirty-one years, and because the district had to cut two routes to balance the budget.

At the first drivers’ meeting, Trey stood in front of the big county map in the bus garage and tapped his tablet, and a projector threw little colored dots all over the wall.

“This software,” he said, “took every address in the district and redrew our stops. Fewer stops. Shorter routes. No more turning around in people’s driveways. We’re going to save eleven thousand dollars in fuel this year alone.”

Wilbur Yeoman, our head mechanic, leaned over and whispered, “Eleven thousand dollars. That’s one transmission.”

“Hush,” I said.

“I’m only saying.”

Trey looked our way. “Questions?”

I raised my hand. “Who checked the new stops? In person, I mean. Who drove out and stood there?”

“The software checks them,” he said, and he smiled the way you smile at somebody’s aunt at a wedding. “It uses road data, traffic counts, sight lines, the works. That’s the beauty of it, Mrs. Sumner. No more guesswork.”

“I don’t guess,” I said.

A couple of the younger drivers laughed. Trey didn’t.

The Bottom of Sawmill Hill

I read my new route sheet that night at the kitchen table with a cup of decaf and a pencil. Most of the changes were fine. A few were better.

Then I got to the Ulery stop and put the pencil down.

For twenty-six years, I had driven down Sawmill Hill Road to the Ulery place, swung around in the wide gravel pull-off by their mailbox and picked up whoever lived in that house on their own side of the road. This year that was Zayden Ulery, seven, who talked nonstop about sharks, and his sister Stevie, ten, who never talked at all until you asked her about horses.

The software had cut the turnaround. The new stop was at the bottom of the hill, where Sawmill meets State Route 39. To get there, those two kids would walk a third of a mile down the gravel shoulder in the dark, then stand at the edge of a fifty-five mile an hour state highway, on the inside of a curve, and cross both lanes to reach my door.

I know that curve. Coming east, you can’t see the bottom of Sawmill until you’re four hundred feet from it. In the fall, with the fog off the creek, you can’t see it until you’re on top of it.

“What is it?” Wayne asked from the recliner.

“They want the Ulery babies crossing 39 at the curve.”

He put his paper down. Wayne strung wire on those roads for thirty-three years. “In the morning?”

“Six-fifty-eight a.m.,” I said. “Pitch dark until the middle of October.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s not going to happen.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

My Notebooks

I should tell you about the notebooks now, because everything that came after depends on them.

When I started driving in 1998, Sid Tennyson gave every new driver a black-and-white composition book and told us to write down anything that seemed wrong. “Write it down the day it happens,” he said. “With the time. Memory is a liar and lawyers know it.”

Most drivers lost theirs by Christmas. I kept mine, and bought another every August. Twenty-eight school years, twenty-eight composition books, in two banker’s boxes on a shelf in our basement next to Wayne’s deer-hunting gear.

In them, I write the date, the weather, the mileage, the time I arrive at every stop that runs late or early, and anything that happens. Every car that runs my red lights when the stop arm is out, I write down. Make, model, color, plate if I can get it, time, location, which way they were headed. If I get a plate, I call it in to the State Highway Patrol post that afternoon, because in Ohio, passing a stopped school bus is a real ticket, five hundred dollars and points, and a driver’s report with a plate is enough for them to go knock on a door.

Over twenty-eight years, I’ve written down three hundred and nine of them. I know the number because Wayne counted one winter when he was bored.

“The Software Doesn’t Have an Attitude”

The first morning of the new routes, I drove down Sawmill Hill, past the new stop, and turned around in the Ulery pull-off like I always had. Stevie and Zayden were standing by the mailbox in their reflective vests with their mother, Stacia, who works nights at the distribution warehouse in Dover and was still in her work polo.

“I got a text saying the stop moved,” Stacia said through the door.

“It didn’t move for you,” I said. “Not while I’m driving.”

She looked at me for a second and her eyes went shiny. “Thank you, Twyla.”

The turnaround costs four minutes. I made it up by cutting my idle time at the high school.

On Friday, Trey called me into his office. He had his tablet propped up on the desk, and on the screen was a map of my route with a red line wiggling off it at Sawmill Hill.

“The system flags this as an unauthorized deviation,” he said. “Every single day.”

“It’s the Ulery stop,” I said. “The new one’s at the bottom of the curve on 39. I’m not putting a seven-year-old in the road there.”

“The software rated that stop as acceptable.”

“Has the software ever driven it in fog?”

He sighed. He had a way of sighing that made you feel like a stain on his good shirt. “Mrs. Sumner. I’ve got forty-one drivers. If everyone decides which stops they like, I have no system. Please run the route as assigned.”

I wrote it up instead. A Driver Hazard Report, the official district form, which Sid had kept in a wire rack by the time clock for thirty years. I described the curve, the sight distance, the speed limit, the fog. I attached a hand-drawn map. I made a photocopy for my notebook and put the original in Trey’s mailbox on Monday morning.

On Wednesday it was back in my own mailbox, with his neat printing across the top: REVIEWED. NO ACTION NEEDED.

I filed a second one. Same result. I filed a third and added that I had driven the curve myself at 6:55 a.m. with a tape measure and Wayne, and that you could see the bottom of Sawmill from four hundred and ten feet away on a clear morning. At fifty-five miles an hour, a car covers that in about five seconds.

That one came back too.

The day of the third write-up, he didn’t sit down. He stood behind his desk with his hands flat on it.

“This isn’t about the stop anymore,” he said. “It’s about attitude. You question everything in front of the other drivers. You’ve been dismissive in meetings. And I have a written parent complaint about you being rude and confrontational.”

“From who?”

“I’m not going to share that.”

“Then I’m not going to apologize to nobody,” I said,.

“The software,” he said slowly, “doesn’t have an attitude, Mrs. Sumner. You do.”

I picked up my keys. “Then I’ll tell you what. You drive it. Tomorrow at 6:58. You stand at the bottom of Sawmill Hill in the fog and you hold a seven-year-old’s hand and you wait for a gravel truck to come around that bend. If you still want the stop there afterward, I’ll move it myself.”

He didn’t drive it.

On October 9, at 3:40 in the afternoon, after I’d parked Bus 22 and swept it out, Trey Wakefield handed me an envelope in front of the time clock. Termination for insubordination, repeated unauthorized route deviations and “a persistent pattern of unprofessional attitude.” Effective immediately. I was to turn in my keys and badge.

Wilbur Yeoman stood in the garage door with a wrench in his hand and his mouth open.

I set my keys on the counter. Then I went out to Bus 22 and took my notebook off the dash, because that was mine.

The Substitute

I didn’t cry until I got home. Then I cried in the garage so Wayne wouldn’t see, and he came out anyway holding a can of root beer like it was medicine.

“Twenty-eight years,” I said.

“I know.”

“He said attitude. Like I’m a teenager at the mall.”

“You do have an attitude,” Wayne said. “It’s just usually pointed in the right direction.”

The next morning, a substitute driver took Route 14. I won’t put her name in this, because none of it was her fault. She was twenty-four and she ran the route as assigned. She stopped at the bottom of Sawmill Hill, on the inside of the curve, at 6:58 in the fog.

Stacia Ulery called me at 7:20.

“Twyla,” she said, and she was crying so hard I could barely understand her. “They’re okay. They’re okay. But a pickup came around that curve while Zayden was halfway across. The bus driver laid on the horn. He stopped maybe twenty feet from my son. Twenty feet.”

I sat down on the kitchen floor with the phone.

“Did you get the plate?” I asked. It was the only thing I could think to say.

“Stevie did,” Stacia said. “She wrote it on her hand in marker. She said Miss Twyla always writes down the plate.”

Stacia’s Kitchen Table

That night, I drove out to the Ulery place with one of my banker’s boxes in the back seat. Stacia had a pot of coffee on and her kids were in bed. Her cousin was there, and two more mothers from up the ridge, including Tonya Villareal from the Upland Ridge stop, whose oldest I’d driven to graduation in 2014.

“We heard,” Tonya said. “The whole ridge heard.”

I put the box on the table and opened it.

“These are my notebooks,” I said. “Every year since 1998. I don’t know what good they are now. But I’m not going to sit at home while he tells the board I’m a cranky old woman with an attitude problem.”

Stacia opened the one from 2003. *Oct 14. 7:02. Sawmill/39. Fog heavy. Silver sedan passed stop arm eastbound at speed. No plate. Called post anyway.*

She turned the page. *Oct 21. 6:59. Sawmill/39. Gravel truck eastbound, could not stop for flashers, slid. Moved Ulery pickup to mailbox turnaround permanently. Sid approved.*

“That’s why the stop is up at our mailbox,” Stacia said. “It’s been up there since before I lived here. I never knew why.”

“Because it almost happened in 2003,” I said. “And it almost happened again this morning.”

Tonya slid a plate of pumpkin bars toward me and said, “The board meets the twenty-eighth. Public comment is three minutes per person. How many people do we need?”

“For what?” I asked.

“For them to listen,” she said.

Twenty-Eight Boxes of Kids

I spent the next two weeks at the kitchen table with my notebooks and a highlighter. Wayne made supper, and a spreadsheet, which surprised us both.

Every stop-arm violation at the corner of Sawmill and 39, I highlighted in yellow. Thirty-one of them. Every hazard report Sid had answered had his initials and a date. The three I’d filed with Trey said NO ACTION NEEDED.

Then I went looking for the parent complaint.

Trey wouldn’t tell me who’d filed it, but my termination letter said the complaint was dated August 29, and it said the parent described me as “aggressive and hostile at the bus stop.” On August 29 I had run my afternoon route and nothing at all had happened at any bus stop. Except, my notebook said, one thing.

*Aug 29. 3:27. Route 39 at Upland Ridge. Black Silverado, chrome tow hooks, passed stop arm westbound, two kids on steps. Plate written. Called post 4:05. Driver honked and gestured at me.*

And beside that, in the margin, in pencil, three days later: *Trooper says ticket issued. Driver is a parent, Route 9 elementary. Name Scott Varney.*

I sat there with my reading glasses on top of my head and laughed out loud for the first time in two weeks. Wayne came in from the den.

“What?”

“I know who filed the complaint,” I said. “It’s the man I got a five-hundred-dollar ticket for passing my bus with kids on the steps.”

The Board Meeting

The Sugar Valley school board meets in the high school library on the last Tuesday of the month. Usually there are seven people in the audience.

On October 28, there were a hundred and sixty. The custodian propped the doors open and people stood in the hallway. I saw a woman I’d driven from kindergarten to senior prom in 2001 holding a baby on her hip. I saw two of the young drivers from the garage in their district fleece jackets, standing right next to Wilbur Yeoman, who had put on a tie for the first time since his daughter’s wedding.

Trey Wakefield sat at the end of the board table next to the superintendent, Dr. Saul Whitcomb. He looked out at the crowd the way you’d look at a weather radar that had turned purple.

The board president, Valda Sorrell, a retired bank officer with a voice like a librarian, tapped her gavel. “We have, it appears, a lot of public comment tonight. Three minutes each. Please state your name.”

Stacia went first. She stood at the microphone in her warehouse polo and told them about the fog and the pickup and twenty feet. Her voice cracked once, on the word “son,” and she kept going.

“My daughter wrote the plate on her hand,” she said. “Because the woman you fired taught her that. That woman drove my mother. She drove me. She drove my kids for three years and turned around in my gravel every single morning, and you fired her for it.”

The library went very quiet.

Tonya Villareal went next. Then the woman with the baby, who said, “Mrs. Sumner once stopped the bus and walked me to my door because she saw my dad’s truck wasn’t in the driveway and the porch light was off. I was eight. My mom had fallen asleep after a double shift. Mrs. Sumner waited until she opened the door. I’ve never forgotten it.”

Then Valda Sorrell said, “Mrs. Sumner, do you wish to speak?”

I stood up with my banker’s box. Wayne carried the second one and set it in front of the board, and he winked at me, which almost undid me.

“I’m going to try not to use my whole three minutes,” I said. “I’ve got twenty-eight school years of notebooks in these boxes. I’ve marked every time a car passed a stopped bus at the corner of Sawmill Hill Road and Route 39. There are thirty-one. I’ve got copies of the hazard reports I filed this fall, which came back marked ‘No action needed.’ And I’ve got the reason the Ulery stop was moved off that corner in 2003, in my handwriting, initialed by your last transportation director.”

I slid the photocopies across the table. Valda Sorrell put on her own reading glasses.

“Mr. Wakefield,” she said, without looking up, “were you aware of these reports?”

“They were reviewed,” Trey said. “The software analysis…”

“Did you drive the stop?”

He opened his mouth and closed it again.

The Trooper

That’s when a man stood up in the back by the reference shelves. He was in a gray State Highway Patrol uniform, tall, about forty, with a crew cut going silver at the sides, and he had a manila folder under his arm.

“Madam President,” he said. “Sergeant Stefan Yurek, Highway Patrol, New Philadelphia post. I’m not on the agenda. I’d like to ask for three minutes anyway.”

Valda Sorrell looked at the superintendent, and the superintendent looked at the crowd, which was making it very clear what it thought.

“Go ahead, Sergeant.”

He walked up to the microphone. Then he turned around and looked at me, and his face did something I’ll remember for the rest of my life.

“Mrs. Sumner drove me to school from 1999 to 2005,” he said. “Route 14. I got on at Upland Ridge. I was the kid who threw up on the bus every single field trip.”

People laughed. I put my hand over my mouth.

“I’ve been assigned to stop-arm enforcement in this county for eleven years,” he said. “Every time a school bus driver calls in a plate, it comes across my desk. I went back through our records this week. Since 2015, drivers in Sugar Valley Local have reported a hundred and fourteen stop-arm violations with usable plates. Sixty-one of those were reported by one driver.”

He held up the folder.

“Her reports are the most accurate we get. Time, place, direction of travel, plate. She has never once been wrong about a plate. We have issued citations on every single one of them we could prove. That includes a citation issued on September first of this year to a Scott Varney, for passing her bus at Upland Ridge with children on the steps.”

I watched Trey Wakefield’s face as the name landed. He’d never thought to ask why the parent was so angry.

Sergeant Yurek kept going, calm as a weather report. “I also pulled the crash data for the corner of Sawmill Hill and 39. It’s in here. I’d strongly encourage the board not to put children in the roadway on the inside of that curve. And for what it’s worth,” he looked at Trey, “I’d be happy to drive it with you any morning. Bring a coat.”

He set the folder down next to my notebooks and went back to the reference shelves, and the library came apart. People stood up. Somebody in the hallway whistled. Wilbur Yeoman was clapping like a seal.

Valda Sorrell let it go on for a good twenty seconds before she touched the gavel.

Executive Session

The board went into executive session at 8:15. They were gone for fifty minutes. Nobody left. When they came back, Trey Wakefield wasn’t with them.

Valda Sorrell read from a sheet of paper. The board was rescinding my termination, effective immediately, with back pay. The Ulery stop was restored to the mailbox turnaround, and the district would hire an outside traffic engineer to review every stop the software had moved on a state highway. Every Driver Hazard Report filed since July would go to the board’s safety committee directly. Mr. Wakefield had been “reassigned, pending review, to administrative duties at the central office.”

Then she took her glasses off.

“Mrs. Sumner,” she said, “the board would like to apologize to you. Publicly. We should have asked you the question you asked at the first drivers’ meeting. Who checked the stops? We didn’t ask.”

I said, “Thank you, ma’am,” and sat down hard, and Wayne put his arm around me.

What I Said to Trey

I saw him one more time. It was two days later, in the garage, when I came in at 5:45 for my first route back. He was clearing his desk into a cardboard box. The tablet was on top.

“I didn’t want you fired,” I said. “I want you to know that.”

“You made me look like an idiot in front of the entire district.”

“No,” I said. “I filed three forms. You could’ve driven out there any morning. I asked you to.”

He stopped then. He looked at me for a long moment, and I’ll give him this: he didn’t argue.

“The software rated it acceptable,” he said, quieter.

“The software’s never had to hold a seven-year-old’s hand in the fog,” I said. “That’s the only thing I was ever trying to tell you.”

I hear he’s working for a different district now, managing contracts for a bus routing company. I hope he drives the stops this time.

Bus 22, 6:57 A.M.

On the Monday after the board meeting, I climbed onto Bus 22 at 5:52. Wilbur had taped a note to the steering wheel. Yellow sticky note, block capitals, his terrible handwriting.

WELCOME BACK. THE EMERGENCY DOOR STILL STICKS. W.Y.

I laughed so hard I had to sit down in the driver’s seat for a minute.

I did my walk-around. I wrote the mileage and the temperature in a brand-new composition book, the twenty-ninth. Forty-one degrees. Fog.

At 6:57, I came down Sawmill Hill Road and swung into the gravel pull-off by the Ulery mailbox. Stevie and Zayden were standing there in their reflective vests. Stacia was behind them in her warehouse polo, and next to her, of all things, stood Sergeant Stefan Yurek in his uniform with a travel mug, leaning on his cruiser.

I opened the door.

“Morning, Miss Twyla,” Zayden said, climbing up. “Did you know a great white shark can go three whole months without eating?”

“I did not,” I said. “Sit down, please.”

Stevie stopped on the top step and held up her hand. On the back of it, in faded blue marker, was a license plate number she had refused to wash off for three weeks.

“I’m keeping it until Halloween,” she said. “For luck.”

“You’re keeping it until your mother makes you take a bath,” I said, and she grinned and went to her seat.

I looked down at Stefan Yurek. He lifted his travel mug at me.

“Just checking the sight lines, Mrs. Sumner,” he said.

“Don’t throw up in my bus,” I said, and closed the door.

I’ve thought a lot, these past weeks, about the word attitude. Trey used it like it was a diagnosis. Like something was wrong with a woman who asks questions out loud. But I’ve been asking questions for twenty-eight years, and writing down the answers, and I guess that’s all an attitude really is: deciding ahead of time what you won’t let happen, and then not letting it happen.

Those notebooks are back in the basement now, two boxes, and a third one starting. Wayne says I need a bigger shelf.

I told him to build one.

If somebody in your life has a notebook like mine, or a stubborn streak that’s kept your kids safe, send this to them today. They probably need to hear that it mattered.

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