Officials in Greenville Public School District again delayed taking any action following a two-day strike by bus drivers last month.
Between 13 to 20 bus drivers for the district skipped work to protest reduced pay and what they said is poor work conditions. Following the strike, which is explicitly illegal in Mississippi, the school board reversed a previous decision to reduce the number of work days for the next school year by five.
However, the board attorney this week advised the board undo that action. The board has not yet followed that advice.
At its meeting Tuesday night, Superintendent Debra Dace presented board members with additional information they had requested about the incident, including a timeline and a list of the bus drivers who participated. The strike law passed in 1985 clearly states that school board members themselves are responsible for reporting the names of those who went on strike to the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office. For each day that those names are not reported by the board to the state, the individual board members and school administrators can be fined between $100 and $250.
“At the last meeting, the board requested a timeline and justification of the names (of bus drivers) that were on the list just to ensure that all of those names needed to be on the list and if anybody else’s name needed to be added to the list so we could get further clarification of getting this information in to the state auditor’s office,” said Jan Vaughn, board president.
But the board voted unanimously not to take any further action and did not indicate if or when it would.
Requests for comment from Vaughn and Antoinette Williams, another board member, were not returned Wednesday. The superintendent said she had “no comment at this time.”
READ MORE: Greenville bus strike could transform public education in Mississippi
READ MORE: Here’s why Greenville school bus drivers went on strike
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