An investigative report conducted by the Arizona Republic and AZCentral.com revealed that nearly three of every 10 school buses on the state’s roads failed annual inspections conducted by the Department of Public Safey.
That means that, yes, a whopping 30 percent of Arizona school buses are deemed to be not safe for the roads. At least at the time they were inspected they were not.
More than a decade ago, DPS proposed a “school bus self-inspection” program for school districts and school bus vendors. It was seen primarily as a cost savings measure for the agency, because it would have reduced the number of buses that required state-conducted annual inspections.
At the time, I was the chairman of the Arizona School Bus Advisory Council. We stood firm in our objection to such a weakening of the school bus inspection program. At the time, the problem was that DPS only allocated two to three officers to inspect 7,500 buses scattered across 114,000 square miles.
Instead of adding officers, DPS wanted to reduce the number of inspections. The plan was that districts with an excellent inspection track record over a period of years would be exempt from full fleet inspections conducted by the state; these districts would self-certify that they conducted the inspections in-house and submitted their reports.
Our argument against the plan was that school bus safety and inspections, just like with commercial airlines, should never be the target of budget reductions. Fortunately, DPS has increased its inspection program significantly over the last several years, and the result is that with 100 percent of the state’s school buses still undergoing stringent inspections, the true patterns of many school districts have come to light. DPS as a whole and its Student Transportation and Bus Inspection division performs a remarkable job.
I might add that some of the districts that were previously identified as qualifying for this self-inspection program in the mid-2000s are the very ones who show up in this investigative report as having a large percentage of failed inspections.
The report includes a database that parents can use to type in any school bus license plate number and the school district to receive details on whether their child’s bus passed or failed the DPS inspection. They can also search an entire district’s fleet simultaneously.
Editor’s Note: Paul M. Novak retired from the U.S. Army in 1995 and recently retired again after 21 years as the director of transportation and school safety for Tempe School District #3 in Arizona. He is now president and CEO of Gauge Precision Consulting, LLC.
