FRISCO, Texas — STN Transportation Director of the Year Keba Baldwin sat on a panel discussion Saturday afternoon with peers Julie Hrebicek of Magnolia Independent School District in Texas and Quanika Dukes-Spruill of the Newark Board of Education in New Jersey.
Dukes-Spruill said she contracts with 63 providers, which requires a lot of management, oversight and compliance checking. The district transports 4,500 students in-district with another 600 students transported to and from out-of-district programs. She said last year a large undertaking was updating routes to adhere to a new district policy of universal bell times. In house, Newark has a small fleet of school buses operated by 19 drivers.
Meanwhile, Hrebicek said Magnolia ISD north of Houston has a district of 152-square miles, 115 routes, 85 of which are regular and 30 are special needs. She said Magnolia does contract out some Mckinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act students and some students with high-intensity behavior. After a $4 an hour pay raise, she said her district went from being 20 drivers short to having 12 currently in training.
Hrebicek said Magnolia is growing, and staff are seeing a lot of behaviors and various levels of those behaviors exhibited by students with disabilities. However, she said, what she’s finding is that instead of placing students in the least restrictive environment, transportation defaults to placing students in the most restrictive due to accommodating parent requests.
She continued that drivers are provided with high-intensity training to handle behaviors, as there have been several physical altercations with drivers and aides.
Dukes-Spruill said bus aides are an important part of transporting students successfully and safely. “It’s the driver’s responsibility to get there but not necessarily manage behaviors on the bus,” she said in terms of transporting students with special needs.
Written into the contracts with transportation providers, she said that each route must have an aide. Plus, she said, the district also has transportation inspectors that ensure every guideline and rule in the contract is being carried out on the road.
Baldwin, the director of transportation for Prince George’s County Public Schools in Maryland, added he, too, has seen a growth in the number of students with IEPs and transportation as a related service. He said when it comes to IEP, transportation needs to have a seat at the table. He said with the various disabilities served, transportation depends on and collaborates with its special education teams to guide the decisions.
Dukes-Spruill agreed that collaboration is key. She said that Newark has monthly mandatory partnership meetings that are designed for two-way communication, where the district and contractor partners share expectations and things that are working or not.
Hrebicek said if transportation isn’t present at the IEP meeting, service requirements could be put in the contract that may work in the classroom but are unsafe when on the school bus. She underscored the importance of a transportation employee’s perspective.
Dukes-Spruill added that vendors are required to provide incident reports on anything that happens on the bus. Plus, transportation employees request GPS location if buses are late and camera footage, if needed. She said it’s in the contract that they will request this information.
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Baldwin said one benefit has been pulling camera footage remotely but also viewing live feeds. Driver and dispatcher communication is crucial, he said, because the dispatcher can log in remotely to see what the situation is and then decide next steps and communicate it to the driver and others who need to be involved.
He noted it’s important to go back to the basics and build relationships with students as well. “There is always other ways, you can’t depend on one way to do something, you have to have multiple options to serve students,” he said, adding the student may have had a terrible day at their school, and now they’re going to be on a school bus for an hour, which could lead to dangerous situations.
He said they encourage drivers to ask, “How are they, today?”
Hrebicek noted that safety is paramount, and while her staff tries to convey to a student that what happened at school, happened at school, “let’s have a new time on the school bus.” If the student is deemed to be unsafe on the school bus or another vehicle, the parent would be called to transport them and receive the necessary expense reimbursement.
Dukes-Spruill said Newark’s transportation department has a strong partnership with the office of special education. She noted a child who is experiencing dangerous behaviors will not be placed on the bus without intervention.
