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REBECCA CATALANELLOPasco County transportation director Mike Park said she should have used her radio to call for assistance, rather than let it aboard.
Sherry Hattaway was only trying to quell a chaotic situation when she allowed four teens onto her school bus with a gagged, live, 4-foot alligator, her attorney said Tuesday.
"We're not leaving the alligator and we're not getting on the bus without the alligator," Hattaway's attorney Larry Hart said the students told their bus driver.
That's a different account than students aboard and school officials gave Monday.
Hattaway, 41, was operating a school bus on Thursday when a group of students deboarded, then chased, wrestled and captured an alligator in a rural pasture before climbing back on the bus with the reptile in their arms.
The bus driver has been suspended with pay, and school officials plan to recommended the School Board suspend her without pay during its next meeting - a precursor to possible termination.
"No one in their right mind would allow children on a bus with an alligator," Pasco County transportation director Mike Park said.
Hart said that Hattaway had stopped along the rural Lacoochee bus route to let out one student. As the deboarding child exited the bus, her book bag hit something that tumbled out of the bus and onto the ground. Hattaway asked another student to pick up the object - Hart said he thought it was a broom - and, while the doors were open, the students spotted the alligator and ran out to chase it.
Hattaway's choices at that point, Hart said, were limited: leave the children in the field with the gator or allow them to board with their catch, the mouth of which students had already clamped shut with electrical tape.
To let the kids on, he said, "was the lesser of two evils."
"She did not encourage it," Hart said of the kids' desire to go after the gator. "In fact, she tried to stop it."
Park said Hart's account was a new story to him. Hattaway, a bus driver since 1999, did not say anything of the alligator incident to school officials until they questioned her Friday afternoon, after they had been tipped off by a parental complaint about the incident.
"All she had to do was radio us for assistance," Park said. "There's no doubt that there was an alligator on that bus and she had a two-way radio."
That kind of hindsight is easy for a school official to suggest, Hart said. But, she was trying to rein in the "chaos." The attorney conceded that Hattaway should have spoken at some point to someone at the district about the situation, but he said she was not an instigator.
On Monday, kids involved in the incident said Hattaway let them go after the alligator.
"She was yelling at them to leave it alone and get back in the bus and they wouldn't do it," Hart said. For her part, Hattaway on Tuesday referred all comment to her attorney.
Jimmie Scroggins, the father of two of the kids involved, said Monday that he came home that Thursday to find children gathered around his pickup truck, gawking over the staid alligator lounging in back.
The elder Scroggins said he released the gator into the nearby Withlacoochee River.
State attorneys have scheduled a March 19 date for questioning in the incident, Lt. Clyde Jordan of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission said.
Bob Dorn, who oversees secondary schools for the district, said officials were not going to pursue suspension for the children involved. But the schools did send home letters to parents, he said, stressing the seriousness of the incident.
"They acted with the consent of the adult, which in the child's mind makes it okay," Dorn said. "In 36 years of education, I have never come across an alligator in a bus."