GREENSBURG, Pa. — When Erica Hoboda said her daughter came home from school upset a few days before Thanksgiving, she knew something was up.
“She just came home with a look on her face. I’m like, “What’s wrong?” and she just sat on my couch and bawled her eyes out,” Hodoba told Channel 11′s Andrew Havranek.
She said her daughter, who is in 5th grade, was yelled at by the bus driver for eating a cupcake on the bus. It’s against the school’s rules to eat on the bus, but Hodoba said it was how the bus driver handled it.
She said several kids were eating on the bus but he only yelled at her daughter.
“Most of them in the back had cupcakes,” Hoboda said. “That’s stupid. Why make her feel some type of way and not everybody else.”
According to the criminal complaint, Hodoba confronted the bus driver when he came to pick the kids up from the Autumn Brook apartment complex in the morning. Police say she screamed at the driver, got onto the bus so he wouldn’t close the door on her, and became belligerent, shouting profanities at him.
Police say it was all captured on the bus surveillance camera. Channel 11 asked police for that video, but it was unavailable Thursday.
Greensburg Salem Superintendent Kenneth Bissell sent Channel 11 a statement reading in part, “The police officers and bus driver handled the disturbance appropriately and kept our children safe when faced with the situation of someone in an elevated state of emotions.”
“I’m not going to say I was in the right. I was not right. I’m right for defending my kid, I don’t care what the cops say, I don’t care what anybody says,” Hoboda said. “When it comes to my kids, I’m going to defend them, especially if they’re feeling some type of way on a bus, with a bus driver who doesn’t respect them.”
Hodoba said this isn’t the first time kids have complained about their experience on the bus and were glad someone said something to him.
“All those kids that got off that bus said ‘thank you for yelling at him because he’s always telling us to shut up, he’s always mean to us, he told a child if they were going to eat on the bus he was going to make them get on their hands and knees and scrub the floor,’” Hodoba said.
Havranek reached out to DMJ transportation. They did not have any comment.
Hodoba regrets how she acted.
“Could’ve handled myself better. Didn’t,” she said. “That’s why I’m accepting what I’ve done, I’m accepting the fine, I don’t have an issue with that. But I don’t care who it is. I’m going to defend my kid.”
Hodoba is due in court in February.
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