Driver Ousts Boy, 7, for Carrying Lizards on Bus

Seven-year-old Tristan Martin was riding the bus to school with three small lizards tucked away in a secure plastic box, along with gravel, leaves and twigs--all destined for show and tell.

But 1 1/2 miles from Gates Elementary School in El Toro, according to Tristan’s father and two witnesses, the driver discovered the second-grader’s cargo, berated him until he began to cry and gave the Laguna Hills boy an ultimatum: leave the lizards on the side of the road or get off the bus.

Tristan, the school’s Student of the Month for May, chose the latter. So at an intersection next to two storage yards, a church and an apartment building, he got off--accompanied by two older girls whom the driver asked to act as escorts. The girls confirmed Tristan’s version of the events.

Outraged, Tristan’s parents have called for the bus driver to be fired. The Saddleback Valley Unified School District says only that it is investigating the incident.

“There are hundreds of other things the driver could have done that would have been preferable to leaving three kids almost two miles from school,” Tracy Martin, the boy’s father, said Thursday about the Tuesday morning incident.

Martin, a computer consultant, and Leslie Ball, the boy’s mother and a trial lawyer, said they want to make sure this doesn’t happen to anyone else’s child.

“You put your child on the bus and you expect them to be taken to school safe,” Ball said. “They could have been kidnaped or hit by a car because there is no telling what could have happened to them out there.”

Maryam Mansouri, 11, one of Tristan’s escorts, said: “He’s just a little kid, so anything could have happened to him. . . . He’s only in second grade. He could have gotten lost. He didn’t know how to get to school.”

Officials of the school district and Mayflower Contract Services, which employs the driver and operates the district’s buses, said an investigation is under way. They declined to comment on the incident and would not say if the driver, whose name was not released, will be disciplined or if there is a district policy that forbids drivers to force elementary schoolchildren off buses.

“I don’t see what’s so newsworthy about this particular incident,” said Robert Cornelius, the district’s assistant superintendent of business services.

As Tristan sat on the front porch of his parents’ home Thursday playing with the lizards, he said he was confused about why he was ejected. He said he has never had a problem with any of the drivers who take him on his seven-mile, 35-minute daily trip. And he insists that he was not being disruptive with the 2-inch-long lizards, which he planned to display during his class’s show-and-tell session.

“I was just showing the lizards to my friends, but they were in the cage,” Tristan said. “She (the driver) didn’t even know I had them until some kid told her. She told me that no pets are allowed on the bus, but I didn’t know that. I didn’t want to leave them by the road because somebody would take them.”

Tristan said he was let off the bus about 8:50 a.m. and was not sure how to get to school, but the two older girls did.

After leaving the bus, Tristan, fifth-grader Maryam and sixth-grader Kara Ely began their 30-minute walk to school. They passed a busy shopping center, crossed Muirlands Boulevard--a highly traveled four-lane street--and cut through a park before arriving at Gates elementary, tired but safe.

Forough Mansouri, Maryam’s mother, said she is not only angry that her child had to walk 1 1/2 miles but that her child was made responsible for the well-being of a 7-year-old.

“I’m sure the reason she helped him was because she has a little brother that age and she is always taking care of him,” Mansouri said. “But if the bus drivers are going to do this, I don’t want her to ride the bus anymore.”

Since the incident, Tristan has had trouble sleeping, cried when he was taken to school Wednesday and was scared when he saw the bus driver, his parents said. They said they plan to take him to a psychologist.

“We want to put this behind him, that’s why we want (the driver) fired, so that he won’t have to relive this every time he sees her,” his mother said.