When it comes to transporting students with disabilities, First Student drivers and attendants are in a class of their own. These individuals are specifically chosen for their compassion and their dedication to caring for all students, no matter their abilities. Once they’re carefully selected, they undergo a comprehensive training program that encompasses many facets of transporting students with disabilities.

First Student drivers transport 12,000 students with disabilities each day.  Thanks to continual professional development such as workshops, on-the-job training, and hands-on exercises, First Student drivers and attendants are equipped with knowledge and skills in a variety of areas. They’re able to manage behavioral challenges, provide for individual needs relating to verbal and nonverbal communication styles, secure wheelchairs and other needed equipment properly, and communicate effectively with parents. Due to First Student’s compassionate approach, these professionals build bonds with students that can last far beyond the school year.

First Student drivers and attendants spend extra time in training and on the job to give children with disabilities the attention, time and care they need to ensure their ride is safe, comfortable, and stress-free.

They show patience, courtesy, and understanding to student riders and their parents. And they constantly work at enhancing their skills and care.

That’s dedication !

In two separate incidents, motorists were recently caught on camera passing a school bus while the stop sign was out, almost hitting children.

On Tuesday, in Cartersville, Georgia, a man driving a truck almost hit a 15-year-old girl while passing a stopped school bus, reported the AJC Atlanta.

The girl was reportedly crossing the street to board the school bus when she was forced to jump out of the way to avoid being hit, the article reported. A video released Thursday shows the bus coming to a stop and activating the red lights and stop-arm.  The bus driver, Shannon Banks, blew her horn to alert the student that the driver was not going to stop.

The article stated that the truck driver, Blake Tyson Lockwood, was found at his home and arrested on charges of reckless driving, failure to maintain lane, failure to stop for a loading school bus, failure to obey stop sign, unsafe driving and improper right turn.

In another incident, this one in Houston, Texas, FOX26 reported that Josephine Kirk-Taylor was waiting for her daughter’s bus to arrive after her first day of school. The bus reportedly pulled up on the opposite side of the street.  Kirk recorded her daughter get off the bus, which was stopped with its stop-arm and red lights activated, when a motorist sped past.

STN’s data shows that three students have been hit in school bus stop related incidents in the month of August for the 2019-2020 school year. During the 2018-2019 school year, STN recorded and found that 70 students were injured and 17 killed in school bus stop related incidents.

Regardless of more awareness being placed on stop-arm violations, this continues to be an ongoing problem.  Districts continue to try to find ways to alert the public of this major safety problem.

A school district in Mobile, Alabama has announced immediate plans to deploy a fire suppression system in all of its special-needs school buses and eventual plans to add the system to the rest of its buses.

Mobile County Public Schools will install Fogmaker North America’s fire suppression system for engine compartments on all of its 100 special-needs school buses within 60 days, according to a news release from the system supplier. The district will eventually equip its remaining 600 buses with Fogmaker’s self-contained water mist fire suppression system.

“As the largest school district in Alabama, we serve as a role model with the deployment of proven technology to enhance the safety of our students,” said Pat Mitchell, the district’s director of transportation. “We believe the installation of Fogmaker fire suppression systems confirm that commitment to our students, their parents, and to our local communities.

“We commend Mobile County Public Schools as they take this substantial step of adding additional safety to their bus fleet,” said Kent Tyler, executive vice president of Fogmaker North America. “I think we would all agree that school buses are the safest form of transportation on the road. But as the NTSB outlined during their recent hearing, fire suppression is a critically important safety issue. Our patented Fogmaker technology is designed to not only automatically suppress these thermal events, but also provide additional time for occupants to safely evacuate the bus.”

Due to all the fires recently reported on school buses across the nation, especially the older models, this is a step in the right direction in making school buses safer.

InterMotive Vehicle Controls announced it has developed an exclusive new seatbelt warning system for Freedman Seating to install in buses.

The announcement of the new Safe-T-Seat seat information tracking system came a month after the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) proposed an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking (ANPRM) and published it on Sept. 27 in the Federal Register. Amending Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) 208 would require warning systems to alert drivers of vehicles that weigh less than 10,000 pounds that their rear passengers—potentially even those riding in school buses—are not wearing their seatbelts.

NHTSA said it wants to hear from stakeholders by Nov. 26 on a variety of issues related to a potential requirement for a rear seatbelt warning system. From the school bus industry, it said that wants to hear if school buses should be exempted or not.

Currently, FMVSS 208 only requires the driver seat position to be equipped with a warning system if the seatbelt is unbuckled, but NHTSA said most automakers also install the warning system for the front passenger seating position. However, few manufacturers extend the technology to rear passengers.

InterMotive said in a press release that the Safe-T-Seat responds to that proposed amendment by adding the seatbelt use warning systems specifically in buses. The company based in Auburn, California said its new system for Freedman displays and tracks the occupancy and belt status of passenger seats, then provides audible and visual warnings for the driver.Safe-T-Seat will trigger an alert if a passenger sits down on the seat but does not buckle-up, or buckles before sitting. The system can also record and store data in case of an accident, company officials noted.

The Safe-T-Seat will be available for purchase during the first quarter of 2020.

Thousands of students across the country joined several schools in various weather conditions to celebrate Safe Routes to School Annual Walk and Bike to School Day. For more than 20 years, International Walk and Bike to School Day have helped students stay safe while they travel to and from school.

Safe Routes for Schools stated that more than 5,000 schools nationwide participated in the event.  Many school districts and local law enforcement promoted the day on social media. Schools celebrated the day with pep rallies, assemblies with the school band and local officials coming out in support.

While Wednesday, October 2nd, was the official International Walk and Bike to School Day, districts celebrated throughout the week and chose a day that worked best for them

NHTSA recommends these safety best practices when walking to school:

Watch the road, not your phone.

Walk on the sidewalk or, if there is none, walk facing traffic.

When crossing the street, cross at a corner or marked crosswalk.

Stop and look left-right-left for vehicles, motorcycles and bicyclists. Wait to cross after traffic has passed.

Be sure to push the pedestrian button and wait for pedestrian crossing signals, if available.

Never play, push or shove others when you walk around traffic.

Safe Routes for School posted on its website that walking to school when you live near, promotes health, allows students to gain independence, confidence and allows students to arrive at school ready to learn.

There are multiple factors school districts need to address in order to maintain the safest, most effective transportation operation.  Here are four key factors every leader should practice to ensure the best transportation for your district, your community, and most of all, your students.

-Maximize Safety:  To maximize safety, build a culture of safety, then find ways to measure it.

This includes engaging and educating the community about adopting behaviors around safety in order to avoid injuries and collisions. It also includes having an updated safety plan, comprehensively training drivers in emergency procedures and bullying prevention, obtaining and maintaining the best equipment, and measuring safety monthly and annually by gathering student and staff metrics.

-Overcome Driver Shortages:  To overcome driver shortages, adopt a three-step approach: recruiting, training, and retention.

To start, district leadership should collaborate with recruiting experts and the current driving team to adopt the three-step approach listed above.  Make sure to look at hiring trends. Knowing these cycles will help you plan and spend recruiting dollars more effectively. Hire a full-time human resources expert to lead your recruiting efforts.  Place plenty of signage at operations, on buses, and at hiring events. Engage in creative outreach on local news channels and through social media.  Once you have the best drivers in place, dedicate yourself to retaining them.

-Leverage Technology:  To leverage technology, implement tools such as bus-tracking apps, advanced routing systems, and predictive analytics.

Today’s bus technologies are improving student transportation and education in myriad ways, making it easier for you to do the same when you integrate them into your transportation plan.

-Measure Quality and Reliability:  To measure quality and reliability, create an action plan, then follow through on a regular basis.

Three important measures of reliability are on-time statistics, driver performance, and a well-maintained fleet.

When you incorporate these four key factors into your transportation plan, you can turn challenges into opportunities, making transportation to and from school work best for the students it serves.

A special-needs school bus driver and aide in Piedmont, SC, just a few miles from Carolina Bus Sales, are being credited with finding a boy on Monday morning who had gone missing the night before.

Bus driver Carlos and aide Linda (the two did not want their last names to be used) were on their daily route for Greenville County Schools when they saw a boy riding a bicycle erratically in the middle of the roadway.  They were concerned because neither of them had seen a child riding a bicycle in the heavily wooded area before, and they had just discussed a news story they had seen about a missing boy in the area.

Carlos slowed down the bus and was able to get the boy to stop. He and Linda confirmed that the boy was the same one in the news report after the boy told them his name. The boy then got off his bike and began running, and Carlos radioed the bus yard and asked Linda to stay on the bus while he ran after the boy. (District policy allows the bus driver to leave the bus if the aide stays aboard to take care of the students, Beth Brotherton, the director of communications for the district, told WYFF).  Carlos was able to convince the boy to get on the bus. He was thirsty, Linda said, so they gave him some water and grapes. Carlos radioed the bus yard and the boy was taken to safety.

“We are a special-needs bus … and we just thought this [child] needed some special attention,” Linda added. “[We were] just in the right place at the right time.”

“Their instincts and training kicked in, allowing them to realize that he was not an ordinary child riding his bike to school, but rather a vulnerable young person in need of help,” Brotherton said in an email. “We are proud of their teamwork.”

Just another incident where drivers do more than just drive school buses but keep our children safe in other ways.

The questions in front of us are what is causing severe school bus driver shortages all over, why are bus drivers leaving or retiring from these positions at a faster pace, and what is so different now that makes driving a school bus less appealing than ever before?

Many ideas and points of view on this issue come from school bus drivers, trainers, and some route supervisors or managers from across the country.  Here are six key reasons that school bus drivers hang up their keys.

1. Low Pay:  School bus drivers earn less per hour than other CDL class drivers on the road.
2. Limited Hours:  Drivers work a split shift, so there is a limited number of hours they can get. In many cases, extra work, like field trips, pays far less than the amount they get for driving their regular routes.
3. Part-Time Status:  Even if they are offered benefits like full-time employees, employers still consider them part-time because they work one shift in the early morning and another shift in the afternoon. The trouble is that the hours they are required to work are such that it makes it impossible to do any other part-time job, because very few companies will hire them for the hours they have left in their day.
4. Unaffordable Health Care:  Many bus drivers who are offered health and other benefits cannot afford them because there is nothing much left of their check after the premiums for health care are deducted.
5. Start-Up Costs:  They have to come up with money, in most cases, for this job even before or at least at the start of their school bus driver training, because they are going to need a pre-employment background check, drug test, and a physical. Every new driver winds up paying all or a part of the cost of all these things. They will have a Class B CDL after the training, but if they have been out of work and have no money, it is going to be a while before they get a check for this job.
6. Lack of Support:  The main reason people are bailing out of this job faster rests squarely on the shoulders of upper management or administration of bus companies and school systems. Some common grievances include: administrators not backing up school bus drivers when parents complain; policies that don’t support drivers; disciplinary actions that are perceived as unfair; not showing appreciation for oldest employees; and too many hoops for drivers to jump through to get administrators to discipline children for unsafe behavior on the bus.

When parents are shocked that a school bus driver does care, is this not a clear indication that our public school systems are failing on some level and need to make some changes?

South Carolina’s pupil transportation association voted at a recent annual conference to commit to a national association’s school bus safety campaign.

The South Carolina Association for Pupil Transportation (SCAPT) is the first state association to join the National Association for Pupil Transportation’s (NAPT’s) “Zip. Zero. Nada. None.” Campaign. The goal of the campaign is to reach zero school bus rider fatalities by 2025.

Theresa Taylor, president of the SCAPT, said that her association is proud to be the first to commit to the campaign, NAPT reported in a newsletter to its members last week, and that the SCAPT is “confident other states will follow our lead because it’s the right thing to do for the students and families we serve every school day.”

Barry Sudduth, president of the NAPT, said in the newsletter that the South Carolina association’s decision to join the campaign “is no surprise” because of the state’s strong background of pupil transportation leadership. That includes the adoption and implementation of Jacob’s Law, the nation’s first statewide ban on the use of 13-passenger vans in school transportation because they are not as safe as large yellow school buses, Sudduth added.

Developed in February, the “Zip. Zero. Nada. None.” campaign “encourages state and community officials to make commitments to safer school buses and safer drivers while recognizing that they may want to target or tailor their focus based on local circumstances,” Sudduth added.

Kudos to South Carolina for being the first state to commit to this campaign!

In the theme of our recent safety blogs and what states are doing to make school buses safer for our students, we find that the Kansas State Department of Education has launched “Stop on Red, Kids Ahead,” a new campaign that aims to raise awareness about illegal bus passing, and received a donation of materials from a local school bus manufacturer.

As Kansas schools geared up for the 2019-20 school year, the Department of Education conducted outreach to remind motorists that they must stop when approaching a stopped school bus from either direction when its flashing red lights are on and its stop arm is extended. Motorists are required to remain stopped until the bus is no longer displaying its flashing red lights and stop arm. Violation of the law is punishable by a fine and court costs in excess of $420, according to a news release from the Department of Education.

The campaign includes news releases, social media reminders, posters for schools, safety flyers, and informational handouts, as well as 10,000 bumper stickers donated by Collins Bus Corp., a subsidiary of REV Group.

The delivery of the “Stop on Red, Kids Ahead”-themed bumper stickers was held at a press event.  “We are honored to help out with this program to get the word out on stop-arm violations,” Chris Hiebert, vice president/general manager of Collins Bus, said at the event. “Hopefully this helps to keep the kids even safer while riding the bus.”

Illegal passing of school buses is reportedly on the rise in the state, according to data collected by the Department of Education. On April 17, Kansas bus drivers reported 1,040 stop-arm violations as part of the annual Kansas one day stop-arm violation count, which is part of the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services’ annual survey.

School bus safety should be a top priority year-round.  It is the responsibility of everyone to make sure students remain safe.