HAMILL: Bus drivers are unjustly targeted by Bloomberg

HAMILL: Bus drivers are unjustly targeted by Bloomberg

Meet a working couple whom Mayor Bloomberg would see as a Bonnie and Clyde team looting the city’s bank.

Vic DiBitetto is a school bus driver. His wife, Lucy DiBitetto, is a matron on his bus. They both work for Pioneer Transportation, the largest school bus operator in the city, headquartered on Staten Island.

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Vic drives all over Staten Island every morning picking up 20 special-education kids, most developmentally challenged, and Lucy is a matron â€" trained in things like CPR â€" tending to the safety of these special-needs children aboard the bus as they bring them to Intermediate School 61. During the day, the DiBitettos often take the kids on school trips. In the afternoon, they drive them home.

After working 12 years as a matron caring for kids with autism, MS and physical and developmental handicaps, Lucy makes $ 15 an hour and takes home $ 397 a week after taxes. Vic, who has been driving for nine years, earns a whopping $ 22 an hour and takes home $ 700. That’s a combined $ 1,100 a week â€" about $ 53,000 combined take-home pay for a couple working a 10-month year.

They get unemployment in the summers. That’s what they live on in New York City in 2013.

And Bloomberg points his platinum-plated finger at the likes of this hardworking married couple as the culprits bankrupting New York?

Give Mayor Mike another “F.”

Bloomberg deserves a dunce cap and a fast ride back to school on the DiBitettos’ bus for a crash course in math.

“Listen, we’re not asking for some huge raise here,” says Vic. “We’re only asking for security for our jobs and pensions. I’m in my 50s. I wanna hold onto my $ 35,000-a-year job and make sure I have a pension. Does this make us the bad guys Bloomberg’s making us out to be? Here’s a guy, a dictator who changed the rules for himself by spending $ 100 mil to buy his way around the term-limits law for a third term, then changed the law back for everybody behind him, and he has the gall to say a bus driver making 35K is crippling the city?”

Vic says the last thing he wants to do each morning is walk a picket line.

“I want to be working,” he says. “I just want a guarantee I’ll keep my job and not be replaced by some untrained, inexperienced driver. The parents of the kids I drive have to ask themselves who they feel safer with: A driver like me with training and nine years’ experience or some inexperienced driver for minimum wage?”

Lucy took the safety issue a crucial step further.

“President Obama gave a speech in Newtown after the horrible school shootings saying the No. 1 job in America is the safety of our children,” she says. “Well, safety is what we provide every morning from the moment the children step on our bus until we drop them back home in the afternoon. I love my job. But $ 15 an hour in exchange for 12 years’ experience providing safety for special-needs children isn’t what’s wrong with the city.

“I’m a mom. I raised two kids in this city. Believe me, when a mom entrusts me with her child I take that responsibility seriously. All we ask in return is fairness, job and pension security.”