PANAMA CITY — big yellow buses transport thousands of students on a daily basis, most days arriving at their destinations with no incidents. But when a child is left behind or asked by a driver to leave a bus, additional training is held to remind drivers of the correct procedures.
There have been at least two documented cases where drivers ordered young students off school buses at the wrong stop. a kindergartner from Oscar Patterson Elementary school got on the wrong bus in September 2010 and was let off about five miles from her house. a 4-year-old boy from Oakland Terrace Elementary School was dropped off at the wrong stop Oct.18.
In both cases bus drivers did not follow procedures, which would have been to return the students to their school and let the administration location the student’s parents.
“We need to regain the public trust,” said Ken Phillips, the supervisor of transportation. “that is our no. 1 priority.”
Procedures
For Bay District Schools, nearly 10,300 stops daily and 1.8 million bus stops are performed during a school year. Most years there are at least one or two incidents where students are dropped off at wrong locations or protocols are not followed.
To help minimize the number of incidents, the district’s transportation department has created an identification system that uses ID tags for students. some schools have adopted the system while others have not, Phillips said.
If there is an unfamiliar student on a driver’s bus, the drivers handbook calls for the student to be returned to the school. Parents are asked to call the transportation department at 767-4495 if a student is missing or a bus misses a stop.
“the bus drivers are in two-way communications with home base at all times,” Phillips said. “If there is an issue, call transportation. If buses are running late, go online and check out the bus bulletin.”
With the previous incidents, the bus drivers have been suspended for failing to follow procedures and the entire bus driving staff has been brought in for additional training and a refresher on current procedures, Phillips said.
After the incident in October, a parent was brought in to talk to bus drivers and give them the perspective of a parent. many bus drivers are parents themselves.
Driver training
School bus drivers receive more testing and instruction than the typical driver on the road. All school bus drivers must obtain a Commercial Driver’s License and must pass written and skills tests to obtain a School Bus Endorsement. Drivers are trained on how to operate the buses, load and unload students, procedures and emergency medical procedures.
All drivers must participate in pre-employment, random and post-accident drug and alcohol testing.
Ginger Provost was a bus driver nearly two decades ago; she recently was rehired by Bay District Schools as a part-time driver. before her hire, she underwent 40 hours of training.
“one of the things I learned was the new bullying laws and the new laws for commercial driver licenses,” Provost said. “the hours are good. I work 32½ hours a week and I have the middle of the day off.”
Provost starts her day around 6 a.m. and wraps up around 4:30 p.m.
“I like the kids,” she said. “the hardest part, though, of my job is the children and sometimes the parents because they are not on the bus. It’s hard to keep the students seated.”
The district holds two training sessions a year for new drivers. They are taught about procedures and how to operate the buses, and they have to demonstrate their skills on a bus before being allowed to transport children.
The average bus driver makes about $13 an hour and any felony charges in an individual’s background would prevent them from being hired to drive a school bus.
Safety
The National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Department of Transportation agree school buses are the safest form of transportation for getting children to and from school. there are nearly 500,000 school buses that run on a nearly daily basis to transport about 26 million children to school each day, according to the American School Bus Council.
According to the Transportation Research Board, children are 13 times safer in a school bus than in other modes of transportation and students being driven to school or riding with teenage drivers were 44 times more likely to be fatally injured than on a school bus.
School buses by design are big and bright to make them easy to see on the road. School buses do not have seat belts but do use a padded safety cage around students, according to the American School Bus Council.
Although school bus design has not changed in decades, the safety philosophy is that the children are protected like eggs in an egg carton. the seats are compartmentalized and surrounded with padding and structural integrity to secure each bench seat and the children in that seat.
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