The Commercial Vehicle Safety Alliance perhaps thought it would be welcomed with open arms when it sent representative Bill Dofflemeyer to speak on day three of the NASDPTS annual meeting in Louisville. Instead it met downright consternation regarding a plan to roll school buses under a federal commercial vehicle roadside inspection program that school transportation insiders say is only designed to line CVSA’s pockets.
What perplexed attendees was that it became obvious to them that CVSA is not aware of a current national school bus inspection standard that was adopted in 2005 at the National Congress on School Transportation and which will be expanded upon in the next round of specifications and procedures due next year. And taking a look at the CVSA Roadcheck program, it is apparent that the school bus guidelines go above and beyond.
What the CVSA inspections basically amount to is allowing a third-party FMCSA contractor to ensure commercial vehicles are meeting current federal motor safety regs, which school buses are already required to do at the state level. And at an additional cost. CVSA charges membership dues to organizations, mostly trucking firms, to manage the compliance checks. The process might make sense for a on-highway truck that is departing one state bound for another, but how applicable is this for school buses? The answer is not much.
The FMCSA-approved inspections only apply to interstate school bus travel, mostly charter trips operated by a private contractor. But Dofflemeyer and Jack Van Steenburg, director of the FMCSA Office of Enforcement and Compliance who was also in attendance, said the goal is to not only target these school bus trips but all others as well. That doesn’t make sense, school bus insiders assert and correctly so, except for the fact that a little algebra work can uncover a nifty potential windfall from such inspections if they were applied to the approximately 500,000 school buses nationwide, given that school bus companies and school districts pay to become CVSA members. And that money would be going to CVSA, not the school bus industry, which especially is irksome to NASDPTS members.
Van Steenburg told NASDPTS members that FMCSA and CVSA want to partner with the school bus industry to help eliminate the on average three on-board school bus fatalities each year by helping to ensure that the vehicles are sufficiently maintained. True you can’t put a price tag on the life of a child, but this seems to be a lot of recreating a wheel that’s not broken in the first place, and for profit.
Dofflemeyer, who chairs CVSA’s new school bus task force that floated this idea at a September conference in Baltimore, was also scheduled to present later in the day at NAPT with Marshall Casey of the South Carolina Department of Education, who told us that he had yet to meet Dofflemeyer in person and has had only one brief phone call with him over the past week since being asked by NAPT to co-present on out-of-service and inspection criteria.
Update: Casey told us that in meeting with Dofflemeyer, who is also a Maryland state trooper, CVSA is mainly interested in forging a partnership with the school bus industry and obtaining more data on how school buses are currently inspected so as to be in position to influence any necessary and additional safety programs or possible funding. It seems to be a bit of a different direction than was discussed earlier today with NASDPTS members. Likely, the sting from the hornets left a mark. Today’s exercise also undoubtedly opened some eyes and shared more information on the innerworkings of how school bus inspections work. If this all results in a new, powerful friend, and CVSA is certainly influential on Capitol Hill, this morning’s defensive sting could prove to be a well-timed parry.
