A Maryland Bus Driver Was Fired For Letting A Student Rescue An Injured Kitten. PETA and Parents Are Fighting Back.
Cynthia Morgan, 67, had been driving students for Harford County Public Schools in Maryland for 11 years when she pulled over on Heaps School Road in Pylesville, a quiet rural stretch, to let a 10-year-old named Alex Thomas step off the bus and rescue an injured kitten from the side of the road. Alex walked out, picked up the kitten, walked back on the bus, and the route continued. The kitten was brought to safety. Then Morgan was removed from her route and lost her certification as a school bus driver. The district said student safety is its top priority and noted that certification decisions can involve multiple factors. They did not specify what those other factors were. Parents responded by describing Morgan in terms that do not typically accompany the profile of someone who represents a safety concern. She is an angel, said parent Carolyn Kalambihis, who added that the road was rural and low-traffic and that Morgan would not have let a child off the bus if the circumstances were different. Another parent, Julie Long, noted that Morgan buys every child on her bus school supplies at the start of every school year with her own money and sends birthday cards throughout the year. The petition Long helped organize to reinstate her has now collected more than 10,000 signatures.
PETA joined the campaign on October 13, sending a letter directly to the Harford County Board of Education arguing that Morgan should not be penalized for allowing a child to help an animal in danger, and that by firing her the district was sending the wrong message about the kind of compassion it claims to want students to learn. PETA Associate Director Colin Henstock said kindness should not be punished and urged the board to reinstate Morgan and get the right message across to students about helping others in need. The broader context is that animal rescue has legal protection in many jurisdictions precisely because leaving a clearly injured animal without attempting aid carries its own set of concerns, and the road in question is described consistently as rural and low-traffic rather than the kind of environment where stepping off a school bus creates genuine danger. The Harford County district has not reversed its decision as of the time of this writing. What it has produced is a unified front of parents, a PETA campaign, 10,000 petition signatures, and a 10-year-old boy named Alex who knows he helped a hurt kitten get off a road in Pylesville, Maryland, on a school day, with the help of a bus driver who thought that was the right thing to do.
