Transportation professionals and the Iowa Department of Education say they will again urge state lawmakers in 2013 to mandate inspections of all school vehicles carrying students to and from activities.
Current law only requires inspections of buses on regular routes, excluding an increasing number of vans and SUVs that transport students to athletic, academic and extracurricular events.
“This is an issue we’ve been pushing five or six years — to inspect all vehicles that transport students. We’d sure like to see it because we feel it’s a potentially deadly situation out there,” explains Max Christensen, state director of student transportation.
He cites occasions in which districts that have used vehicles for regular school routes have failed inspection. “They say, ‘That’s OK, we’ll just use it for activities.’ And, once it becomes an activities-only vehicle, we don’t have the authority to inspect it,” Christensen notes.
Dan Roberts, immediate past president of the Iowa Pupil Transportation Association, said the group that represents school transportation professionals, also favors the proposed law. Noting lawmakers approved tougher penalties this year for drivers who injure a child when passing a stopped school bus, Roberts adds, “The time is right for change. Our stance as an organization has always been to inspect all vehicles.”
Christensen believes vans and SUVs that transport children may have simply fallen through the inspection law cracks as districts gradually began to use more of those vehicles in the 1980s and 1990s.
He said the “best guesstimate” of student-carrying vehicles currently exempt from inspections ranges from 1,500 to 1,800. “We don’t know because our inspectors don’t have authority to look at those vehicles, so they just don’t see them,” he explains. “We tried to compile numbers from the (Iowa Department of Transportation) but the DOT doesn’t break them down according to school districts versus other government entities so all we really know is that there are about 42,000 vehicles licensed to government agencies in the state.”
Christensen and Roberts agree districts will likely increase their use of vans and SUVs as time passes to save costs and as rural student populations diminish. “Not only are they less expensive to operate than a yellow bus, if you’re taking a yellow bus you have to have someone licensed to operate it,” he adds.
While Christensen would like to see lawmakers mandate inspections for all vehicles carrying students, he knows the result would stretch his current staff too thin. Iowa’s two inspectors visit every one of the state’s 348 districts twice a year. “They are very disciplined as they put their schedules together because they conduct approximately 15,000 inspections a year. Each one takes about 15 minutes so that comes out to 46 weeks of work, not including the time it takes the guys to travel district to district,” Christensen explains. “That’s based on a 40-hour work week and, quite frankly, our guys put in way more time than that.”
Inspection fees were imposed about a decade ago when elected officials decided the school transportation office should be self supporting. Fees climbed from $15 per inspection to $20 in 2005, $25 in 2007 and $28 in 2009. “We’ve had some discussion about a fee increase. If we hire a third inspector, we’ll have to have one,” Christensen says. “Sometimes we get a little pushback on the inspection fee but $28 is $56 a year per bus right now. Take a vehicle to your local garage for an inspection twice a year and see how much that costs. When you consider that we’re going to their facility, it’s well under what they’d be charged elsewhere.”
In addition to expanding inspections, Roberts, who is the director of transportation at Davis County Schools in Bloomfield, favors additional training for teachers or other school-approved adults who drive smaller vehicles carrying students. “You may have the cheerleading instructor or young teacher or even a parent driving. You can’t just have someone jumping in there. That driver needs to have some training, not to the level of a CDL, but they need to have some defensive driving skills,” he says.
State Sen. Mary Jo Wilhelm, a Cresco Democrat, managed a mandated-inspection bill to Senate passage last year. It failed to clear the House Transportation Committee. Odds of a similar measure’s passage in 2013, she said, will depend on House Republicans.
Wilhelm said she discusses the issue of children’s safety as she campaigns this fall for reelection against a Republican incumbent who was drawn into the same district during reapportionment.
House Transportation Committee Chairman David Tjepkes, a former state trooper, said the issue requires lawmakers to balance different interests and philosophies. “My personal opinion is that every time the Department of Education brings something like that to us, naturally, we’re going to take a look at it,” he says. “However, if you look at the statistics, the accident and injury ratio for school vehicles is extremely low, which tells you it is a very safe mode of transportation.”
Meanwhile, he points out, increasing inspections will require more inspectors — and increase districts’ costs. “You have to ask yourself, ‘Is that really the best way to go? Some people think the state is only one that knows how to inspect buses but you can set standards for local districts that they can follow. And, they may be under more pressure than anyone to make sure children are transported safely,” he says. “Any responsible school administrator, board or (transportation professionals), you have to cut those people some slack because they are certainly going to make wise decisions, too.”
Christensen notes that local districts are already bound by law to inspect buses once every 12 months, meaning buses are inspected three times each year “yet our guys still find some very bad problems.”
Gov. Terry Branstad has not taken a position on the proposed legislation, according to communications director Tim Albrecht.
