Keep this in mind as school districts prepare for the start of school or are already up and running with school transportation operations: school bus driver training hours, not a requirement but a recommendation, pale in comparison to other transportation sectors.
The construction of the yellow school bus, which is subject to some three dozen Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, is more stringent than any other vehicle on the road. Those are reasons enough why school buses are also the safest mode of highway transportation there is and the absolute safest way for kids to get to and from school. But are you ready and to explain that fact to not only parents but local media during this back-to-school news cycle?
Despite the very low numbers of student fatalities each year inside the school bus, school bus drivers average three times fewer number of training hours than do their counterparts behind the wheel of municipal transit buses. Thats 35 hours of training a year for school bus drivers versus the federal requirement of 114 hours for transit agency employees. But that comparison pales next to what Greyhound requires of their drivers, 200 hours, or next to interstate trucking requirements, 250 hours.
The reason school buses remain so safe, again, is due to the fact they are built like tanks, as most everyone in the industry knows. School buses also travel at much lower speeds than other vehicles, they are equipped with high-back, padded seats and the industry strictly self-regulates itself when it comes to driver background checks.
Jeff Cassell, the vice president of school district operations for driver trainer School Bus Safety Company, commented that 99 percent of all crashes are caused by unsafe driver behaviors. He recently asked me to define the word safety, and in doing so he ventured that many school bus drivers and safety trainers would not be able to do so with out the use of a dictionary.
So you can guess how I responded: I picked up my dictionary and flipped the pages the letter “S.”
Merriam Webster defines safety as “the condition of being safe from undergoing or causing hurt, injury, or loss.” Certainly school bus construction plays a factor in helping school districts reduce risk and make school bus transportation the safest mode of travel there is. Certainly, too, the many safety devices in and around school buses also contribute to this end. So perhaps it would help to look up the word “risk,” which M-W also tells us is the “possibility of loss or injury : peril” and “someone or something that creates or suggests a hazard.”
Let’s now turn our attention to last week’s fatal school bus crash in Missouri. While a final crash investigation by the Missouri Highway Patrol and NTSB is not expected for at least another month, preliminary reports indicate that the crash was the fault of both school bus drivers. The first bus that struck a pick-up truck and killed its 19-year-old driver was apparently caused by driver inattention after a semi-truck cab slowed for traffic. Then, another school bus driver allegedly was following too closely behind the first school bus. The result was the second bus smacked into the right rear of the first bus, killing a 15-year-old girl in the process.
School bus drivers are obviously human and prone to error. But, in the same breath, the industry can’t simply rest on its laurels and say that tragic events like the Missouri crash are an unfortunate fact of life. Yes, the school bus is the safest vehicle on the road today, and the vast, vast majority of school bus drivers are the absolute safest people on the road. But last week’s crash should serve as a reminder that there can always be lessons taught when there is the loss of human life. Dwell on that when risk-reducing behavior is being taught this summer.
