The Tecumseh Public Schools located about 40 miles southeast of Oklahoma City is changing driver behavior around school bus stops with the help of an important and close ally: the chief of police.
Chief Gary Crosby also drives one of the 20 routes for Tecumseh’s Director of Transportation Teddy Kidney and has done so for the past several years. Last year alone, Kidney said Tecumseh had at least two dozen known incidents occur, a large number for a town with a population of only 6,500, and he added that many times several cars will illegally pass the bus at one time.
“We got together and talked about problem spots,” said Kidney, who has led the transportation department for the past three years. “He got with his officers to start sitting at those problem areas, and we began to issue citations. Our community has begun to get a little gun shy on running red lights. We just kept at it and at it.”
While officer also target morning routes, they particularly pay attention to stops in the afternoon, which Kidney said is the most frequent time motorist violate the law. Officers have become adept at being inconspicuous as they monitor traffic, especially at one particular stop on a curved, four-lane road. There, officers issued 13 citations over a two-month period last school year. That school bus, Kidney said, often times has 65 to 70 students on board.
“They just kept hammering every day until we started seeing results. We were working on them all over town. It’s slowed way down,” he added. “I think a bunch of these communities doing a deal like this really cuts down on red-light violations.”
Kidney said the next step is to place ads and influence articles in the local newspapers to continue not only spreading word in Tecumseh but throughout Shawnee County.
Earlier this year, Oklahoma passed new state school bus regulations that allow LED lights for all lighting and lamps, including on stop arms. Last fall, the state enacted Oklahoma Aaron’s Law named after 17-year-old Aaron Zentz, a student at Yukon Public Schools in the Oklahoma City area. Zentz was killed when another motorist ran a red light and struck his vehicle in an intersection. If convicted of killing another person while behind the wheel, motorists now face a minimum of a $1,000 fine and a maximum of one year in jail.
That law extends to school bus safety, as any motorist convicted of running the stop arm and red lights on a school bus can also have their license suspended for up to one year. However, judges have the leeway to issue deferred sentences.
Kidney and others said the one-year suspension is “harsh,” but that something must be done to curb the high numbers of illegal passings. Kidney added that within the next couple of years the school district likely will also begin equiping its fleet with stop-arm video cameras.
Tecumseh Public Schools transports more than 900 pre-kindergarten through 12th grade students over a 90 square-mile areaeach day, about 41 percent of the total student population of 2,200.
