Sidebar 1:

The Fuss about the Bus
Pulling back from Casey’s situation specifically, but using it as a reference point, the incident brings to light many complex issues concerning school bus safety that concern many nationwide but, perhaps because solutions are costly and budgets are tighter than ever, are often not high on the list of administrative priorities. Those concerns include:

• Often insufficient and inconsistent bus drivers training
• A need for paid bus monitors on at least some, if not all buses
• Consistent policies for discipline and incident reporting that carry over from the school to the bus and apply district wide.

“Bus drivers are typically untrained paraprofessionals who work for two hours in the morning and for two hours at the end of the day,” says the IVDB’s Stephen Smith. “They don’t often get professional development opportunities; they are not usually required to have special skills besides driving. And then to expect these people to handle the behavior of 60 kids or so while driving is a bit unrealistic.”

Many bus drivers agree. In a survey of bus drivers conducted by the American Federation of Teachers, 54 percent of those surveyed from around the country indicated that they have concerns about student discipline; 23 percent had concerns about threats of violence and assaults. While the average driver receives approximately 13 hours of training, 14 percent of bus drivers surveyed by School Bus Fleet Magazine say they receive no training at all.

According to Jan Anderson, director of transportation for Eugene 4-J Schools, Eugene bus drivers receive 10 hours of core training required by the state to operate a school bus. Only approximately two hours of their training addresses behavior management skills. And while the district has additional classes available for student management, participation is generally voluntary, unless management feels a particular driver needs more training in that area.

Sylvia Franze, a teacher, parent, and former substitute bus driver in Texas, brings up another concern. In recent years, driver shortages have required many districts to rely heavily on substitute drivers. While the regular route drivers in her district in Texas receive 20 hours of training, of which maintaining order is discussed only briefly, substitute drivers, like Franze, received no training at all.

The driver on Casey’s route was a regular driver, not a substitute driver. But the fact that an incident of this severity occurred under the supervision of a trained driver makes the point Franze raises about substitute drivers even more concerning.

When drivers surveyed by School Bus Fleet Magazine were asked, “What is your biggest challenge?” some respondents answered that dealing with students who have no respect for themselves or others was their primary challenge.

Other related problems included the systems of reporting incidents and inconsistencies between schools when drivers transported children on the same bus to more than one school.

“It’s always been kind of a flawed system,” admits Van Geem, principal of Monroe Middle School, who explained that, as a principal, he does not hire or fire the bus drivers and that he and his assistant principal then are expected to handle disciplinary referrals from employees that they do not supervise directly.

“There are issues around bus drivers in terms of their ability to deal with students,” Van Geem said. “Sometimes they write tickets (bus discipline rerferrals) when they shouldn’t and sometimes when they don’t they should.”

In an Eastern Kentucky University focus group study conducted for the Hamilton Fish Institute on School and Community Violence, teachers, administrators, bus drivers, students, and parents were interviewed to find out what their perceptions were regarding school bus safety.
A question raised by one teacher was, “Why is it that teachers are lectured not to leave kids in a room without a certified teacher, yet bus drivers are not only not certified but really not even trained?”

Franze compared the difference between the challenges of being a teacher and keeping a classroom orderly to that of driving a bus and keeping it orderly.

“There’s a huge difference,” Franze says. “First of all, you’re sitting in the front of up to a 40 foot bus filled with kids and your back is to them while your eyes are on the road trying to watch traffic laws. In a school, a teacher often has built-in respect. People automatically don’t respect bus drivers because of their pay. Teachers generally have the respect at the beginning and can lose it. Bus drivers start out with little to no respect and have to earn it.”

The key to earning that respect, says Ted Tull, administrative director of National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, is to make sure that drivers are well-trained with regard to the school’s discipline policies and that infractions are consistently and equally enforced. And, once a student violation occurs, it’s critical that the school back the driver up.

“The kids know from the first day, first ride what they can get away with,” Tull says.

Apart from low pay (most report a pay of $11 an hour), part time hours, and conditions that large loads of children who apparently have little respect for their drivers, there are other challenges to schools in trying to improve pupil transportation.

While Eugene 4-J Schools operates its own pupil transportation services, many districts across the country use contractors and some split transportation between contract and district operated services. Balancing the quality of drivers, providing equivalent and sufficient training for employees, and consistent authority over drivers who may not be directly employed by the district can be challenging. And when there is an incident, as in a situation like Casey’s who is responsible? The driver? The company for which the services are contracted, if they are contracted, or the district?

“You can pass authority, but you can’t pass responsibility,” Ted Tull says.

To imply that bus drivers are ineffective would be incorrect. In fact, just as schools are one of the safest places for children, according to the National Highway Transportation Safety Association, school buses are the safest form of highway transportation. Every year, approximately 440,000 public school buses travel approximately 4.3 billion miles to transport 23.5 million children to and from school and school related activities. But while the NHTSA does tabulate the number of student fatalities that occur each year, there are no reliable national data on the number of incidents of bullying experienced by children on buses each year. And this is the area that concerns most now.

To receive federal funding under the Safe and Drug-Free Schools and Communities Act of 1994 school violence reduction and prevention programs, a state must submit the results of a needs assessment to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) for such programs, including data on the prevalence of violence by youth in schools and communities. However, not all states require reporting incidents that occur on school buses and other economic forces, within the communities themselves, encourage underreporting of violence incidents. In communities where there are multiple schools and districts, a school can become stigmatized for years if it reports high levels of violence.

Implementing consistent forms for incident reporting from school to school and state to state aside, even if drivers buy into the need to report incidents on their buses, how can a bus driver, who is supposed to be keeping their eyes on the road, simultaneously police bullying activities on the bus?

The same week that the video of Casey Woodruff was seen nationwide, different bullies hung a Virginia boy by the back of his shirt from the ceiling of his school bus where he dangled until others on the bus lifted him up to unhook him. That instance also escaped the attention of the bus driver.
“I think the only way you can really do it is to have bus monitors whose sole purpose is to ride on the bus and watch the kids,” Franze says. “I just don’t know of any other way.”

In Kentucky, monitors are required for preschool children and on buses for physically challenged children because those students are required to wear restraint devices such as seatbelts. In the event of an emergency, the monitors are able to assist in the removal of students from the restraints. Other districts have experimented with bus monitors for their general populations but often do not have the resources -- human or financial -- to try them effectively. Driver shortages classified as “severe” or “desperate” have been experienced by 19 percent of those surveyed by School Bus Fleet Magazine and budgetary constraints, according to Tull, are worse this year than in previous years.

“I will give you a one word answer about why we don’t have monitors on most buses riding up and down these roads: Finances,” says Tull.

Indeed, Ciel Woodruff says she asked Jan Anderson if monitors could be placed on Casey’s bus route and was told that budget cuts made having monitors difficult to fund and that finding people who would take a job that dealt mainly with discipline problems would be challenging.

Gaye Barker, coordinator of the National Education Association’s Bullying and Sexual Harassment Prevention/Intervention Program, says that it is time to redirect priorities and stop using money as an excuse for protecting children.

“I think it’s so lamentable that there is not a monitor on every school bus in the country because you cannot expect the driver to drive and be aware of highway safety and pay attention to what’s happening to the kids all the time,” Barker says. “That’s what they all claim (that they don’t have the money), but what’s more important? A child can’t learn if they are being beaten up on their way to and from school. You have to place your priorities somewhere and it’s strange that that’s what always gets cut.”

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