ABC News and 20/20 last week exclusively aired the audio taken from video on a Dale County (Ala.) Schools bus in January when Jimmy Lee Dykes shot and killed bus driver Chuck Poland and abducted a 5-year-old student with Autism.
He could have taken several kids if not for the specific actions of Chuck Poland,” Stephen Richardson, the FBI special agent in charge, tells reporter Pierre Thomas. Thomas added that Poland’s widow said she is “so proud” of her husband.
So is the entire student transportation industry.
Education Week reported in its May 22 edition that states are stepping up mandates for school safety drills. The May Web Exclusive on stnonline.com provided a breakdown of new laws passed so far this year in response to the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn., in December as well as the murder of Poland in Alabama.
Yasmina Vinci, executive director of the National Head Start Association, blogged this week in the Huffington Post about how the devastating effects of sequester cuts are shutting windows of opportunity for at-risk children across the country. She writes that, while greater investment in early childhood education is being called for, sequester is dampening the prospects of America’s most vulnerable.
Readers Digest picked up on a story reported earlier by STN on Veolia Transportation school bus drivers who sprang into action immediately after the Boston Maraton bombings in April to usher runners and spectators to safety.
Today we said bon voyage to Corina Van Damme, STN Media’s multimedia consultant, who is moving back to home to the San Francisco Bay area to take a job with CBS Interactive.
Corina started with STN Media as an intern last January as she finished her education at California State University at Long Beach. After graduation, she was hired full time to coordinate our growing video and multimedia projects. Many in the student transportation industry may know Corina from the STN EXPO or the NAPT Summit, where could be found both in front of and behind the video camera.
We thank Corina for all her help over the past year and a half and wish her a very bright future!
