Driver Suspended for Forcing Boy, Lizards Off Bus : Dispute: Transit service takes the action while its investigation continues.

A school bus driver who forced a 7-year-old boy to get off the bus and left him stranded because he was carrying three pet lizards in a box has been suspended indefinitely, school and bus company officials said Friday.

The driver will be suspended until Mayflower Contract Services, which operates buses for the Saddleback Valley Unified School District, completes an investigation, said Craig Campbell, a Mayflower supervisor.

“The suspension is solely Mayflower’s doing,” Campbell said. “It is just a normal disciplinary step we take when an action like this takes place.”

The driver, who has not been identified, told second-grader Tristan Martin to get off her bus Tuesday morning several miles from his home after he refused to leave the reptiles on the side of the road.

The boy, who was bringing the lizards to school for show-and-tell, walked the 1 1/2 miles to Gates Elementary School in El Toro with two older companions, a fifth- and sixth-grader who agreed to help him find his way. Tristan, Kara Ely and Maryam Mansouri, who were left at the corner of Orange Avenue and Whisler Drive in El Toro, trekked to school in 30 minutes, but only after crossing several heavily traveled streets.

“This shouldn’t have happened this way,” Peter A. Hartman, the district’s superintendent, said Friday. “In my opinion, we just need to make sure we properly communicate the way to take pets to school.”

Campbell, the Mayflower supervisor, would not comment about the employee’s driving record with the firm but he did say other drivers in the company support her.

Tristan’s father, Laguna Hills computer consultant Tracy Martin, called the suspension a “good first step” but added that the driver should be either transferred from the route or dismissed.

“I don’t want my son to have the chance of having her as his bus driver again,” Martin said Friday. “It’s too traumatic for him.”

Martin said he has taken Tristan to a psychologist, who recommended that the boy avoid the driver. He also discussed the situation with Hartman.

“The father seemed very reasonable to me and obviously very concerned, as he should have been,” Hartman said. “We agreed it shouldn’t have happened in the first place and it shouldn’t happen again.”

Robert Cornelius, assistant superintendent of district business services, said district officials will not take any action until the investigation is completed.

Cornelius said drivers are not allowed to leave pupils anywhere but stops at the school or their home. The district has had a contract with Mayflower for two years.

Tristan is not the first pupil to have taken a small reptile onto one of the district’s 50-some buses. Hartman said in other instances, errant children have agreed to leave lizards at the curb when ordered by drivers.

Drivers can refuse to let pupils onto buses for disciplinary reasons but only at bus stops closest to home, he said, adding that Tristan was partway to school when he was kicked off.

According to district administrators, drivers who refuse to let pupils board are further required to radio school officials, who must then notify parents.

“We do consider the student the No. 1 goal of any school busing program,” Hartman said. “Nobody is blaming this boy.”

Meanwhile, school board trustees said they are disturbed by the driver’s actions.

“I was outraged when I heard about this,” said Raghu P. Mathur, vice president of the board. “I’m very unhappy that a bus driver would leave a young student with two more minors on the street. I will ask that the school district take the most appropriate steps to ensure that this will never happen again.”

School Board President R. Kent Hann called the incident “a grievous mistake.” But he said a district preliminary report indicated that the driver had apparently thought that the boy had just stepped onto the bus and was getting off near his home.

“She thought that he had been on the bus a whole 25 seconds,” Hann said. “She was not being vicious or mean. It was a mistake.”

Hann said bus company officials had told the district that an emergency meeting was held with drivers Friday to inform them about the incident and make sure that they realized that students should not be forced off buses.

Martin said he did not accept the driver’s account.

“I can shoot that story full of holes,” Martin said. “Tristan had been on the bus for 4 miles. She had asked him if he knew how to get home, and he told her that he didn’t know where he was at. Then he started crying.”

Times correspondent Frank Messina and the Associated Press contributed to this report.