Protection order puts Mathews bus driver in garage

The protection order is in effect until April 13.

STAFF REPORT

WARREN — A Mathews school bus driver was reassigned to the school district’s bus garage on the same day that a Trumbull County Common Pleas Court magistrate approved a protection order requiring the driver to stay away from a child she is accused of mistreating.

Carol Lynne Sassya of Stanley Avenue, Vienna Township, filed with the court Jan. 12 asking that Kathy Kotanichek of Burghill, the woman who drove the school bus that transported Sassya’s children to school in Mathews, be kept away from them.

At the time, Kotanichek had been charged in Girard Municipal Court with endangering children and disorderly conduct after she was accused of making a remark about terrorism to one of Sassya’s children as he was getting off his school bus Nov. 10. The Sassya family is of Lebanese descent.

Magistrate Patrick McCarthy approved an order the next day, ordering that Kotanichek not have any contact with members of the Sassya family until April 13, 2010, or until a further order of the court is issued.

Lee Seiple, Mathews superintendent, said Kotanichek was transferred to the bus garage, where she no longer works around children, on Jan. 13 to wash buses, pending the outcome of criminal charges filed against her.

The school district suspended Kotanichek without pay for three days Nov. 16 over the incident, but she returned to driving her bus after the suspension.

A Vienna police report says Kotanichek “made a statement about being a terrorist” to Hanna Sassya, 14, a student at Mathews High School.

Seiple said in a letter Nov. 13 in Kotanichek’s personnel file that Kotanichek told the boy that people “need to be aware of terrorists.” Seiple noted that the comment was “not only loud enough to be heard by the student, but it was picked up on the bus’s recording system.”

The next court hearing for Kotanichek, who has served as a Mathews bus driver since 1992, is 9:30 a.m. Feb. 24 before Judge Michael Bernard in Girard Municipal Court.