Mother Charged With Crime For Entering School Bus To Help Her Son

Today’s unbelievably stupid news of government overreach comes from Perry County, Pennsylvania. That’s where mother Tara Keener was just charged with a crime for entering a school bus back in December. She’s an emergency room nurse and she saw her son slumped over through the window of the school bus he was riding in. Other kids were yelling at the mother for help, telling her that her 5-year-old son Xander was unresponsive.

She ran up to and into the bus. And that’s the problem, believe it or not.

Apparently — though there’s some dispute over exactly what the law says — parents can’t do this? Why, well, because who knows if they could molest children or something.

Yeah.

Everyone agrees that Keener did nothing but rush to her child, who happened to simply be in a deep sleep. She’s been charged with a misdemeanor and it’s going to trial.

How could this idiocy happen? Well, everyone’s pointing fingers at someone else. The bus company admits that they reported the incident of the mother entering the bus. But they say they’re required to by law and they certainly didn’t think she’d be charged. They concede that Xander was sleeping but say that nobody asked the mother for help and that she was told not to be on the bus.

Five months after the incident, she received a notice that she was being charged and that she could be jailed for a year and fined $2,500.

The DA says he waited until he had a late conversation with an assistant to Dennis Dum, whose bus service company contracts with county schools for transportation services.

He says that this assistant to the owner successfully convinced him that they need to have a zero-tolerance (read: completely idiotic lack of common sense) approach to parents helping children on buses.

”The bus company’s main point is, we can’t let one person do this because pretty soon you’ll have all kinds of parents on there,” [District Attorney Charles F. Chenot, III] said. ”Most parents aren’t a problem, but what do you do when a … sex offender wants to get on the bus and get his kids off? We need to have that protection in place.”

Excellent point. I think we should all check our brains at the door in homage to random sex offenders who might come onto full buses of children once every — what — 50 years? Sounds like an awesome plan, DA Chenot.

Of course, the woman who’s being accused of convincing the DA to press charges says she had no intention of persuading him to do that. She said she was just asking him for information and the next thing she knew, charges were filed.