Hard road, cheap pay, for South Florida school bus drivers

If you think driving a car with a couple of children fussing and fidgeting in the back seat can be distracting, consider the plight of school bus drivers.

They maneuver a bulky, boxy vehicle through busy streets while shouldering responsibility for dozens of otherwise unsupervised students.

It’s a full-time job with irregular hours. The pay? Generally less than $20,000.

At a time when the state is looking to ramp-up security in schools, some point out school buses have not been a part of the conversation.

In Miami-Dade, Florida’s largest school district, which has more than 1,300 drivers, none of the school buses have security cameras, a situation that was underscored not long ago when a 15-year-old student brought a loaded gun onto a bus and it accidentally discharged, hitting a 13-year-old in the neck, killing her.

In New York City, where about 9,000 school bus drivers recently went on strike, close to $7,000 is spent annually for each student passenger. Miami-Dade, the nation’s fourth-largest school district, spends about $1,000 for each school bus passenger.

Parents like Robin Godby of Pembroke Pines say school bus drivers should just be in charge of driving students safely — that there ought to be an aide on board watching students to make sure they’re behaving and are safe.

“I don’t think they get the support,” Godby said of bus drivers. “They have to deal with kids who have disciplinary problems and they have to drive a vehicle.”

She knows what it’s like to try to discipline her two daughters from the driver’s seat.

“It drives me nuts,” Godby said. “Especially if they start fighting or bickering. It’s distracting.”

School bus drivers in Florida’s larger districts can have close to 90 students behind them.

Ronda Martin, with the Office of Labor Relations for Miami-Dade public schools, says bus drivers are paid for the 191 days when students are in school. But she says many of the drivers work overtime and weekends to earn extra money.

“I try to do overtime at least every day, five days a week,” said Sharayne Milton, a school bus driver for Miami-Dade schools. “And if they want me to work on the weekend, I will.”

Milton takes students on field trips and waits to transport students who have after-school sports and activities. Her day starts at 4 a.m. and can end at 10:30 p.m., with about four unpaid hours in between while students are in class.

In Miami-Dade, about 75 percent of school bus drivers are female, which can make it difficult to discipline older, male students.

When fits fly

Driver Gwendolyn Tillman says she won’t get in between fighting students.

“Usually if there are some other guys on the bus and the guys have respect for the bus drivers, the other young men on the bus will pull them apart,” Tillman said.

If nobody pulls the kids apart, bus drivers are instructed to call the district dispatcher — and not the police.

“Our drivers do not take actions against individual students,” said Jerry Klein, who is in charge of school transportation in Miami-Dade County.

“There is a process for them to fill out a report and then the schools deal with it like any other misbehavior in the schools.”

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Hugh Grant is a Dad Again

Hugh Grant confirmed Saturday that he is a dad again.

PICS: Celebs and Their Cute Kids

The 52-year-old British actor tweeted, "In answer to some journos. Am thrilled my daughter now has a brother. Adore them both to an uncool degree. They have a fab mum."

Hugh and actress Tinglan Hong welcomed a daughter named Tabitha in 2011. No word yet on what Tabitha's little brother is named.

Related: Hugh Grant Responds to Jon Stewart Diss

Hugh told The Guardian in 2012 of being a dad, "I like my daughter very much. Fantastic. Has she changed my life? I'm not sure. Not yet. Not massively, no. But I'm absolutely thrilled to have had her, I really am. And I feel a better person."

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Upstate fire department's squirrel hunt fundraiser draws ire

HOLLEY — A weekend squirrel-shooting contest in upstate New York is a sell-out, with all 1,000 tickets spoken for, organizers said, despite a push by animal rights groups and others to cancel the event.

The 7th annual "Hazzard County Squirrel Slam" will raise money for the volunteer Holley Fire Department, the event sponsor.

Prizes ranging from $50 to $200 will be given out Saturday for the largest squirrel shot and the heaviest group of five squirrels. Five rifles and shotguns are to be raffled off, according to a flier on the western New York fire department's website.

Critics have sought to stop the event through online petitions and protests, calling the event cruel and a bad example for children. The contest targeting red and gray squirrels is open to anyone over age 12 with a hunting license.

"Declaring someone a winner for killing the most animals influences children and the wider community to believe that wildlife is unimportant and killing for a monetary prize is meritorious," Brian Shapiro, New York state director of the Humane Society of the United States, wrote in a letter to Holley Fire Chief Pete Hendrickson.

Supporters say hunting is just part of life upstate, including in the largely rural village of 1,800 people on the Erie Canal.

"This is a community of hunters and they're going to hunt anyways. Why not hold a fundraiser that will reach our community," the event's chairwoman, Tina Reed, told the Democrat and Chronicle of Rochester. She said the event has grown each year: This year, 1,000 tickets were made available after it sold out of 200 tickets last year.

Participants must abide by New York's hunting regulations, hunting only where it is permitted and killing no more than six squirrels in a single day. Shooting will be followed by a weigh-in, then a dinner.

State Sen. Tony Avella, a Queens Democrat, called the contest insane during an Albany news conference with the group Friends of Animals earlier this week. The group planned to protest outside the Holley Fire House on Saturday afternoon.

Avella's upstate colleague, Sen. George Maziarz, a Democrat who represents Holley, defended the fundraiser, saying hunting, fishing and shooting sports are part of the region's lifestyle.

"It's like a fishing derby but it's squirrels, not fish," Maziarz spokesman Adam Tabelski said Friday.

Neither the fire department nor members of its board of directors returned telephone and email messages from The Associated Press.

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Sign up for Feb. 21 Miami Herald Small Business Forum

Prepare your best pitch for the Miami Herald’s Small Business Forum, Feb. 21 at the south campus of our sponsor, Florida International University.

In addition to how-to panels and inspirational stories from successful entrepreneurs, our annual small business forum will include interactive opportunities with experts to learn about financing options and polish your personal and business brands.

During our finance panel, audience volunteers will be invited to explain their financing needs to the group. During our box-lunch session, they will be invited to pitch their business or personal brand to our coaches.

Those who prefer just to listen will be treated to a keynote address by Alberto Perlman, co-founder of the global fitness craze Zumba. Panels include success stories from the local entrepreneurs who founded Sedano’s, Jennifer’s Homemade and ReStockIt.com; finance tips from experts in small business loans, venture capital, angel investments and traditional bank loans; and insiders in the burgeoning South Florida tech start-up scene.

Plus, it’s a real bargain. $25 includes the half-day seminar, continental breakfast and a box lunch.

Register here.

Program

8 a.m.

Registration and continental breakfast, provided by Bill Hansen Catering

8:30 a.m. Welcome

Host: David Suarez, president and CEO, Interactive Training Solutions, LLC

•  Jerry Haar, PhD, associate dean & director, FIU Eugenio Pino and Family Global

Entrepreneurship Center

•  Alice Horn, executive director, Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE South Florida)

•  Jane Wooldridge, Business editor, The Miami Herald

Miami Herald Business Plan Challenge Overview:

•  Nancy Dahlberg, Business Plan Challenge coordinator, The Miami Herald

8:45 a.m. Session I – Success Stories

Moderator: Jerry Haar, PhD, associate dean & director, FIU Eugenio Pino and Family Global

Entrepreneurship Center

Speakers:

•  Jennifer Behar, founder, Jennifer’s Homemade

•  Matt Kuttler, co-president of ReStockIt.com

•  Javier Herrán, chief marketing officer, Sedano’s Supermarkets

10 a.m. Session II – All about Tech

Moderator: Jane Wooldridge, Business editor, The Miami Herald

Speakers

•  Susan Amat, founder, Launch Pad Tech

•  Nancy Borkowski, executive director, Health Management Programs, Chapman Graduate School of

Business, Florida International University

•  Chris Fleck, vice president of mobility solutions at Citrix and a director of the South Florida Tech Alliance

•  Charles Irizarry, co-founder and director of product architecture, Rokk3r Labs

11:15 a.m. Keynote

Speaker: Alberto Perlman, CEO and co-founder of Zumba® Fitness

Introduction: Jane Wooldridge, business editor, The Miami Herald

11:45 a.m. Session III – Show me the money: Financing your small business

An interactive session featuring audience volunteers who will be invited to make a short investment pitch before a panel, including experts in microlending, SBA loans, traditional bank loans, venture capital and angel investing. Audience volunteers should come prepared with a two-minute presentation that includes details about current backing, how much money they are seeking and a brief synosis of ow that money would be used.

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Charlie Crist's wife loses custody of two teenage daughters

The ex-husband of former First Lady Carole Crist has been granted full custody of their two daughters, after alleging that she abandoned them and hasn’t returned messages in nearly two years.

“She’s completely abandoned them,” Todd Rome said of his former wife of 14 years in a brief telephone interview Friday.

He said Mrs. Crist, married for four years to former Gov. Charlie Crist, has not seen or spoken to her 14- and 16-year-old daughters since June 8, 2011, and that even simple tasks like getting her signature on documents has become a challenge.

Mrs. Crist and ex-husband Rome had joint custody until Feb. 1, when a family court judge in New York granted him temporary full custody. Rome said he may seek full custody permanently.

“She probably will not fight it, because she didn’t fight this one,’’ he said.

Neither Charlie nor Carole Crist could be reached for comment Friday, and a local lawyer for Mrs. Crist said they would have no comment.

“This is a domestic situation, which is private,” said Sam Heller, her lawyer. “Unfortunately, Mr. Rome has been untruthful throughout this process.”

The court records in New York are not public record, and Rome, CEO of Blue Star Jets in Manhattan, declined to provide a copy of the custody order. He did, however, read the judgement of the phone to the New Times in South Florida, which first reported the ruling.

“The children’s needs haven’t been met,’’ Rome’s New York lawyer, Mark Heller, told the New Times. “She won’t answer calls. Her lawyers won’t answer calls. And we had no choice but go to family court.”

Reached by phone as he was driving with his daughters, Rome said he has no explanation for why Mrs. Crist, 43, cut off contact with his daughters. He then passed the phone to his wife of four-plus years, Vanessa Rome.

“Anything that needs a co-parent signature becomes a complete ordeal, because she doesn’t answer,’’ Mrs. Rome said of Mrs. Crist. Mrs. Crist used to visit her daughters every other weekend in New York City.

Mrs. Rome said Mrs. Crist had no patience for the girls any time they complained about something.

“She doesn’t like to discuss anything or be called out, so if they say anything that rocks the boat she’ll say, 'Okay, bye. I have to go,’ and hang up.”

The former governor has in the past spoken warmly of his stepdaughters — he called them “our children” in 2009 — but Mrs. Rome said “he wanted no part of them.” When in Florida during 2010, the girls constantly found themselves bored at political fundraising events with no one to talk to. Mr. Crist, she said, also had no tolerance for any hint of unpleasant teen behavior.

“He would say, 'I’m not coming to dinner with you with that attitude,’” she said. “Often they were left alone in the hotel room to order room service.”

Mr. Rome has been outspoken in his criticism of his ex-wife’s parenting and in 2011 sued her for failing to pay support. The New York Post wrote about one late-2011 court hearing attended by the Crists. The Post quoted a judge noting that their divorce agreement requires no child support for the daughters living in Manhattan and, “I also can’t make her visit her children.”

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Stripping mom halts school assembly

ALBANY — Police say a parent who got on stage and started to strip during an upstate New York school assembly is facing child endangerment and lewdness charges.

Albany police say they arrested 24-year-old Aydrea Meaders at the North Albany Academy at about 10:30 a.m. Friday.

They say school staff told them the assembly was halted and the cafeteria cleared after Meaders began dancing onstage and took off some of her clothes.

She's charged with seven counts of endangering the welfare of a child and one of public lewdness.

An Albany City Court clerk says Meaders was arraigned Friday afternoon and ordered held on $3,000 bail. She doesn't have a lawyer yet.

The North Albany Academy is a pre-kindergarten through eighth grade school in the Albany district.

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South Florida trade shattered records in 2012

It was a golden year for international trade through the Miami Customs District in 2012, as South Florida’s airports and seaports handled a record $124.73 billion worth of trade and cracked into the nation’s Top 10 customs districts for the first time.

But the Miami district’s top exports and imports were also golden. Since 2009, gold from countries such as Colombia, Mexico, Guyana and Peru has been South Florida’s top import as skittish investors bought the precious metal, pushing its price to lofty heights. In 2012, gold also became the top export of the Miami district, which includes airports and seaports from Miami to Key West.

Last year the district imported a record $7.25 billion worth of gold — a 42 percent increase over the previous year, according to new U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by WorldCity, a Coral Gables media company that focuses on U.S. connections to the global economy.

But almost as quickly as the gold arrives, it is shipped out, primarily to Switzerland and to other European countries in smaller amounts. Last year the Miami district exported a record $7.93 billion worth of gold.

The gold business is a “relatively recent phenomenon,’’ Ken Roberts, president of WorldCity, said at a Trade Connections event in Coral Gables Friday that analyzed the past year’s trade numbers.

Global economic uncertainty, he said, has driven people to the safety of gold and that has pushed up prices. Not only are central banks buying gold; so are many jittery investors.

Miami became the nation’s leading importer of gold in 2009 but imports only totaled $2.14 billion then. Over the past 10 years, the Miami district’s gold imports have increased by 2,420 percent and gold exports are up a whopping 13,433 percent. That corresponds with a huge run-up in the price of gold over the past decade — gold prices increased from around $300 an ounce in mid-February 2002 to $1,730 an ounce in mid-February 2012.

But the volume of gold trade through Miami also has increased.

Roberts noted that overall, Miami district exports increased to a record $73.3 billion, up nearly 6 percent from the previous year, and imports totaled a record $51.4 billion — a 17 percent increase.

Most interesting, said Roberts, is that the Miami District made its move into the ranks of the nation’s Top 10 Customs districts, by value of trade, at a time when the U.S. economy has been sluggish. But 30 percent of Miami’s trade is with South American, Central America and the Caribbean, and many of the Latin economies have been relatively resilient throughout the U.S. downturn.

Brazil remained the Miami district’s No. 1 trading partner in 2012 with $16.4 billion in total trade — a 6.4 percent increase.

“Brazil has had a tremendous decade and they’re a little smug about it,’’ said Scott Miller, a senior adviser at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies and former director of global trade policy at Procter & Gamble. “It’s a tough place to do business and they know it and don’t seem to want to do much about it.’’

Miami traders acknowledge that restrictions and high tariffs make the Brazilian market difficult, but Latin America’s largest economy is so big and diverse that it’s still very attractive. Brazil also is the top source of international visitors to Miami-Dade County.

Colombia, with $9.89 billion in trade with the Miami district, was the 2012 runner-up, and Switzerland, with $8.8 billion in trade with South Florida, was third.

But trade statistics only tell part of the story of international commerce.

Miller pointed out that increasingly, world trade involves the exchange of components rather than finished goods. If one takes out oil, he said, half the world’s trade is in components.

He pointed to Apple’s iPhone, which is made in China from U.S. and Japanese chips, a screen from Malaysia and other components from around the world. “So many things today are made in the world,’’ rather than manufactured start to finish in one location, said Miller. “What is really being done is that we make things together.’’

Every iPhone that is imported into the United States, he said, adds $178 to the U.S. trade deficit, but that doesn’t take into account all the jobs created by Apple’s inventions and design development, its sophisticated customer service system and its marketing apparatus.

“Stop looking at trade as a competition,’’ he said. “It’s a mutually beneficial exchange.’’

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Jackson Health System dismisses trauma petition

Jackson Health System announced Thursday it has filed a notice to voluntarily dismiss its petition for a state hearing that included a suggestion that the state revoke the provisional license for the trauma center at the Kendall Regional Medical Center.

The Florida Health Department is trying to craft a new statewide standard for determining how many trauma centers an area needs.

In a memo to county political leaders, Jackson Chief Executive Carlos Migoya called it “a strategic decision on the future,” meaning it will focus instead on the Florida Health Department’s plan to craft a new statewide standard for determining how many trauma centers an area needs.

The Health Department is holding a hearing next Wednesday in its offices in Doral to get South Florida feedback on how much need there is for trauma centers.

In January, Jackson filed a petition with the state demanding a hearing on why the state had turned down its request for additional trauma centers at Jackson North and Jackson South while the state had granted provisional licenses to facilities like Kendall Regional — licenses that a judge had ruled were granted improperly.

Some county commissioners expressed concerns that Jackson was opposing the Kendall operation.

The state responded on Jan. 31 that Jackson’s petition was invalid and demanded that Jackson show cause by Feb. 14 why the petition shouldn’t be dismissed. Jackson instead decided to voluntarily dismiss it.

In his memo sent Wednesday, Migoya said that Jackson will focus on drafting the new rules. “We intend to provide the medical evidence, expert advice, written testimony and community support to buttress the positions that will best serve our residents.”

Jackson has consistently maintained that the region is best served by having only one trauma center — its Ryder center at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

The HCA hospital chain, which owns Kendall Regional, has been aggressive in applying for new trauma licenses and has received several provisional certifications.

On Thursday, the Health Department notified another HCA facility, the Orange Park Medical Center near Jacksonville, that that it “did not meet the standards” for a provisional center and ordered its trauma operations to cease immediately.

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Nikita Black Badge Exclusive Promo

Nikita has long been one of the most dynamic and rewarding dramas on television. It's also consistently been one of the most underrated. But you'd be hard-pressed to find anyone that isn't coated in a thick layer of goosebumps after watching ETonline's exclusive new promo for the upcoming episodes!

RELATED - TV's Saddest Death Scenes

Featuring first look footage from the next two all-new episodes, Black Badge and With Fire, the two-minute sneak peek opens with a bang, and ends in a fiery blaze.

RELATED - What's Next on The CW's Arrow?

But before the clip comes to a close, Ryan poses an all-important question to Nikita: Is Division inherently bad or is the elite ops agency only as bad as the people in charge?

Tune in Fridays at 9 p.m. to see how Nikita answers that question!

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Devout Catholic SI mom sues city for not allowing daughter to attend class over religious exemption

A devout Catholic mom on Staten Island is suing the city, saying her daughter was barred from attending class because the Board of Education wouldn't recognize her religious exemption from receiving required medical vaccinations.

Dina Check, of West Brighton, has filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the city accusing it of prohibiting her 5-year-old from attending PS 35 on Tuesday -- because of the family's belief that forced immunization violates important tenets of their faith.

"To inject invasive and unnatural substances into this divine creation is showing a lack of faith in God and His way," Check says in the lawsuit."Life is a gift from God, and the body is a marvelous work of divine creation to be reverenced as a temple of God."

The controversy was caused in part by a paperwork snafu - because her daughter already had been granted an exemption from vaccination on religious grounds by state health officials when she attended a YMCA preschool, Check says in the suit, filed in Brooklyn federal court this week.

To make matters worse, Check says she made repeated complaints to city school officials about the issue - only to see them fall on deaf ears, the suit says.

Despite her impassioned pleas asking officials to correct the paperwork error and list her daughter as being exempt from medical treatment on religious grounds, she received nothing more than a litany of e-mails from the Education Department denying her requests, the lawsuit claims.

Some of the correspondence Check sent to education officials quotes various passages of Scripture, Canon law proclamations from the Vatican, and contains earnest pleas asking the authorities to respect the family's religious beliefs.

In the lawsuit, Check also notes that her family physician had given a formal opinion that because the child suffers from immune deficiencies and gastrointestinal problems, immunization posed a medical risk for the girl.

But city school officials rejected that argument, too, ruling that the child's condition was insufficient to warrant exemption from vaccination based on medical grounds, the suit claims.

The suit charges that city school administrators violated laws that exempt children with deeply-held religious beliefs from receiving vaccines.

Check has asked a federal judge to intervene and force the city schools to exempt her daughter from future medical treatment. She also asks for unspecified damages.

mmaddux@nypost.com

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