The superintendent for the Newport-Mesa Unified School District helped kick off the transportation department’s “Very Important Passenger” program, which aims to show the important role student transportation plays in the lives of students and the community.
Dr. Fred Navarro, who was a school bus driver himself decades ago, was the inaugural passenger on May 22, with future events set to take place three to four times a year. Each time, the district plans to invite community members from the education, political and entertainment arenas, said Pete Meslin, director of transportation.
“They will get to share the experience of riding a Newport-Mesa school bus just like the approximately 5,000 students bussed to and from school each day,” he added.
Meslin noted that part of the program’s goal is to make community members realize that student transporters are also educators. Particularly with school bus drivers, they are the first district representative a student interacts with in the morning, and the last one at the end of the school day.
Newport-Mesa Unified serves approximately 21,000 students, said Jeanne Briggs, administrative assistant to Meslin. She added that this type of event would give the guest community member a glimpse into the positive interaction school bus drivers have with their student passengers.
The ride-along event began around 6 a.m. Navarro showed up when all district bus drivers were conducting their pre-trip inspections. He had to mirror what his assigned driver, Daniel Cutenese, was doing in performing his safety checks before transporting students to three elementary schools.
When the school bus returned to the bus yard, Navarro said he said he still remembered some of those safety checks from when he was a bus driver in Southern California.
“It may have been 30 or 40 years ago, but I remember,” he said, and commended Cutenese for knowing the names of all the students on his bus and for performing his job with professionalism.
On behalf of the department, Meslin thanked Navarro by presenting him with a Very Important Passenger certificate at the end of the ride-along, along with a special T-shirt and baseball cap.
