At Suffolk Transportation 'people are very friendly, people care,' a worker says
Diana Krygier, seen in Bay Shore on Aug. 7, 2018, drives the large buses at Suffolk Transportation. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
Snow was coming down hard on the afternoon of March 12, and Olga Quezada had two more preschool children to deliver safely to their homes.
At the height of a nor’easter, Suffolk Transportation Service Inc. driver Quezada was steering her school bus north on Route 112 in Farmingville when it became stuck in the snow. She radioed for help, but with cars all around her also immobilized, she knew it wouldn’t come quickly.
So it was a relief when she saw a motorist pull over and hop out, wearing Suffolk Transportation’s familiar baby-blue uniform shirt. “Are you okay? How can I help?” Quezada, 50, recalled colleague Susan Gilmore asking.
That’s just how people are at the 63-year-old bus company, Quezada said.
“I love it because it’s family, you’re never feeling alone,” said Quezada, who has three grown sons and a grandson.
Sentiments like that earned Suffolk Transportation the No. 3 spot on the list of Long Island's Top Workplaces among companies with 500 or more employees.
Quezada and her assistant, Sonia Campos, 47, played children’s songs on a CD player and used their phones to call the children’s homes, reassuring parents everyone was fine, despite storm delays that turned the trip into a more than 4 1/2-hour ordeal. “I put on music, and they were happy,” Quezada recalled. Gilmore, who had been on her way home, spared an hour and a half to help them.
Bus driver Olga Quezada, front right with her assistant Sonia Campos, and driver Diana Vydia Krygier, at Suffolk Transportation in Bay Shore on Aug. 7, 2018. Credit: Newsday/J. Conrad Williams Jr.
“It’s a great place to work – people are very friendly, people care,” said Teresa O’Halloran, executive director of human resources, risk management and safety/training for the Bay Shore-based company, which has 2,500 workers in eight locations and operates buses for 29 districts and agencies serving schoolchildren and people with special needs, as well as Suffolk County mass transit buses. “Forty percent of our employees came as referrals from the existing workforce. That bodes well, people saying ‘it’s a great company, come work here.’ ”
Suffolk Transportation pays about $20 to $26 an hour and offers health benefits, matching retirement plan contributions and other perks, including annual barbecues, gifts and holiday bonuses, O’Halloran said.
The company’s president, John J. Corrado, took over from his father, John A. Corrado, who purchased it in 1970.
Suffolk Transportation's “culture of caring and mutual respect for our employees...is an affirmation of the unyielding commitment to excellence which was handed down to me by my grandparents who started in this industry as bus drivers in 1922," said Corrado, 54.
The company earned an award from Exton, Pennsylvania, research firm Energage for its employees’ strong agreement with the statement “I get the formal training I want for my career.”
Driver Diana Krygier, 46, said that training helped keep her and her students safe in a crisis.
One day Krygier had just picked up some ninth-graders in Brentwood when she saw a man inching a little too close to the bus. She started to close the doors, but the man lunged in and refused to leave.
“All I felt was, ‘These are my children and they need to be safe, that’s my job,’” she recalled.
She radioed to tell the dispatcher to call 911, honked her horn to get the attention of nearby parents and ordered the students to leave the bus by the emergency doors, moments before the man charged down the aisle.
Krygier and a boy who insisted on staying with her kept the situation under control until police arrived and took the man into custody. Krygier said the company’s periodic training sessions helped her stay calm and act quickly to protect her charges.
Being a school bus driver “really isn’t just driving from point A to point B,” said Krygier, a mother of four. “It’s about forming a relationship, that you’re not a friend, you are the adult, you’re somebody they’re supposed to respect.”
The company’s culture helps too, she said.
“The majority of the supervisors have been bus drivers before, so they know what it’s like to be out there on the road,” she said. “They want us to know that they appreciate what we do and how hard we work.”
- Maura McDermott
Maura McDermott covers education. Since joining Newsday in 2012, she also has worked on the investigations team and covered real estate and the business of health care.
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