ST. LOUIS – St. Louis schools are scrambling to find a transportation provider after Missouri Central School Bus canceled its contract with the district, effective this summer.

This comes a month after drivers staged a sickout after a mechanic said he found a noose at his workstation, and whistleblowers sounded the alarm with demands for safety improvements.

One employee pointed out a cracked brake piston, a critical part to slowing and stopping a moving school bus.

“Mechanics were being told, ‘Listen, what’s more important now is passing inspection.’ Throw the brake pads on there,” Adolphus Pruitt II, president of the NAACP St. Louis chapter, said.

Jerry Ellis, a lead mechanic for Missouri Central, said they had buses on a tow truck every 10 minutes. He claims his bosses were more interested in putting a small bandage on the problem pistons.

“They had a big issue where they complained about the cost,” he said.

Ellis said he’d only allow his own kids on one of these buses if he worked on the vehicle himself.

“If some of the guys worked on (it), and some of the buses I seen, hell no,” he said.

FOX 2 News contacted Mike, an independent diesel mechanic with three decades of experience. Mike has no affiliation with the Missouri Central School Bus. He agreed to look at a photo that the school bus mechanics had taken.

“Very scary situation,” he said. “There is no Band-Aid fix that you would want to jeopardize someone’s life with.”

Mike showed us what a brake piston should look like without the split.

“These would be the pistons. Your brake pad would go on there like that. You can see the end patterns where it was in,” he said. “If that crack would propagate, it would either cause a fluid leak or the piston would chatter and fail.”

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That could be bad, even catastrophic, according to Mike.

“It is possible if they wear a brake pad down to absolutely nothing, that a vehicle can physically lose the brake pad, but that (bus) should get a complete and thorough brake job,” he said.

FOX 2 News has learned that a little more than half of the buses passed their safety inspections last year.

Safety records obtained by the FOX Files found that the Missouri State Highway Patrol inspected 235 city school buses last year. Only 50.6% were approved. Others were either deemed defective (35.7%) or totally out of service (13.6%).

Each year, the highway patrol inspects every school bus. It’s a process that’s happening right now in Troop C, which includes the St. Louis metro area.

“We have thousands of school buses every day transporting millions of kids to and from school,” Cpl. Dallas Thompson, Missouri State Highway Patrol, said.

Corporal Thompson allowed the FOX Files to watch an inspection at a nearby school. Inspectors examined the bus, from steering to suspension to tires and brakes. The four-person team of inspectors checked the bus in 4 minutes and 46 seconds. Inspectors usually do not take the wheels off. In the case of the Missouri Central Bus in St. Louis, Thompson said they may not have seen the crack.

“Some of those moving parts there, unless the wheel is turned a certain direction, it’s possible we wouldn’t have seen a magnitude of that nature,” Thompson said.

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Should the Missouri State Highway Patrol start digging deeper into potential problems?

“That would be something we would speak with the professionals in the motor vehicle inspection division,” Thompson said. “If this was a problem that was happening often, then I’d say yes.

“Very seldom do you see these kinds of problems you see on a regular basis.”

Earlier this month, the FOX Files pressed Missouri Central Bus Regional Operational Manager Scott Allen for answers.

“School buses are absolutely safe in the public school system,” he said. “Do we have prior knowledge of issues of allowing a bus on the street? Absolutely not. We would not jeopardize our employees, our students, our children on a school bus if we knowingly have a school bus that’s unsafe.”

The highway patrol inspected one particular bus after news of the issue and found the part had recently been replaced.

The state is still inspecting buses, so Missouri Central’s final grade has not been released yet.

As for the next school bus provider, the St. Louis Public School District is expected to share an update on the search this coming Friday.

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