The images of a brick-sized block of concrete smashing through the windshield of a Winston-Salem/Forsyth County Schools bus without warning are as sickening as they are terrifying for transportation professionals and parents.
As the veteran driver recoils amid a spray of shattered glass, the deliberately thrown projectile rips through the cabin with violent force.
“The bus was going to school to pick up students. If it had gone through the driver’s side, she would have wrecked the bus on a busy highway,” said M. Darrell Taylor, director of transportation in North Carolina’s fourth-largest school district. “If there had been a child sitting in that second seat, they would have been seriously injured.”
Or worse. The sharp-edged, heavy stone passes at the average elementary school child’s head height at highway speed.
Video can’t always produce in the successful resolution of a random act of violence, but it frequently plays an irreplaceable role in managing and investigating incidents on and, increasingly, outside the bus.
The reason is simple: Video typically captures and delivers irrefutable evidence.
“When you work an incident and there’s not a camera, you’re dealing with he-said, she-said. There are two sides of the story and the truth is in there somewhere. It’s not necessarily that someone is lying; it’s their perception of what happened,” said Amy Rosa, director of transportation, Wa-Nee Community Schools in Nappanee, Indiana. “The camera helps me see the bigger picture of what went on.”
Forward-facing cameras were not able to lead to arrests in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County bus incident or another one a few weeks later, but they did help Taylor share the bigger picture with the public.
“In one video showing the front of the bus, you can make out two people standing on the side of the road, tossing (the concrete) up, but there was no facial recognition,” he said. We looked at it from all angles. So did the police department, but it just wasn’t a good enough angle to tell.”
What the video did do was tell a story far more vividly than words when Taylor, who oversees 358 buses that log a total of 6 million miles a year, shared it with local media. He tied it into the NASDPTS Annual National Stop Arm Violation Count, which occurred two days after the second incident.
Five news stations interviewed Taylor, who talked about the need for drivers to obey stop-arm laws. “It brought a lot more recognition to our drivers, their day-to-day operations and what could happen,” Taylor said. “It’s the kind of story that has made the public look more closely at what’s going on with our buses and along the road. We’re hoping that once it was on TV, it will be a deterrent because (potential vandals) know we have video on the buses.”
Another recent video could come in handy if needed in court, Taylor acknowledged. It shows a motorist running a stop sign and passing a deployed stop arm before the sound of the car crashing into another vehicle is recorded.
Valuable Pieces of Information
Ed Cassidy, director of transportation at Calvert County Public Schools in Maryland, said he believes the purpose of any surveillance equipment is to “safeguard property, equipment and, most importantly, people—not just students, but bus drivers, attendants and motoring public.”
The technology “greatly reduces our turnaround time when we have an accident to review or serious accusation about a student or bus staff.”
When a district bus is involved in an accident, video is preserved to corroborate written reports and testimony. The system also exonerates drivers who become the target of student accusations, further reducing a district’s legal exposure. “In past years, it was really whatever Johnny went home and told his parents. The video has bailed out the drivers more often than not,” Cassidy said.
He said that he values the technology’s return on investment, which comes from reduced time investigating and resolving on-bus conflicts or outside incidents. It starts with the knowledge that the cameras are rolling.
First and foremost, Cassidy added, video cameras act as a deterrent. From 2010 to 2013, he said that the district saw a 25-percent reduction in the number of referrals written by drivers, and that coincided with the implementation of the video camera program.
“If an administrator sees something on video, he still has to give the student his due process, but he doesn’t have to pull other kids out of class or bring in the driver,” Cassidy said. “We’re preserving instructional time for multiple students that, before we had the video, would have been spent in the principal’s office for an investigation.”
On occasions when parents have gone over a principal’s head to the board of education, video has provided necessary evidence to convince them that imposed consequences are going to stand.
“Videos have been used for sexual misconduct, drugs and alcohol on buses and vandalism,” Cassidy said. “We have had video subpoenaed to use in court so it is a valuable piece of information. When it comes to protecting confidentiality, we put recordings on a server only the school principal and transportation director can access. If it’s subpoenaed as evidence, we can burn it onto a DVD.”
Cameras Tell the Truth
Richard Casey, director of transportation at Bellevue Public Schools in Nebraska, said his district has benefited from a partnership with Omaha-based Radio Engineering, Inc., which resulted in the installation of video gear on 10 buses last August.
“Historically, we have not put cameras on our buses, but this was a unique opportunity for us,” Casey said. “REI is a local company, and we were discussing the number of cameras and where to place them when I said, almost in passing, that I would like to catch people who are stop-arm running.”
The resulting agreement placed stop-arm cameras in five buses that REI used to test equipment, and the district had control over five systems that capture stop-arm violations as well as internal video. The district now manages all of the systems.
“We want our drivers watching students. They really don’t have time to look at and capture the license plate of someone blowing through the stop arm,” said Casey, who said he was stunned at the increased number of violations that were automatically recorded.
But, there was a hitch: Nebraska law does not provide for stop-arm, red-light or speeding cameras or third-party ticket writers. Bellevue Police Chief Mark Elbert was willing to write tickets, but determined violators confronted with video evidence have been as repentant as if ticketed and heavily fined.
“We’ve not gone to court yet because we’ve not written tickets,” Casey said. “The Bellevue police will write a ticket if we have a repeat offender, but otherwise, we’re going with warnings.”
Casey said he has promoted the cameras as the focus of local media coverage to raise public awareness about the dangers of stop-arm running. During the last school year, all of the Bellevue district’s drivers, combined, reported 165 stop-arm violations between Aug. 15 and March 1. This school year, the cameras installed on just those five buses captured 118 violations in the same period—and provided irrefutable evidence.
Meanwhile, most of the Wa-Nee school district’s 53 buses are equipped with four interior-facing cameras.
“I have cameras on board to protect drivers. I have a great staff, so it’s not about babysitting them,” Rosa said. “The cameras are there in case someone accuses them of something or in case kids have something happen.”
She cited an episode in which the district faced the possibility of legal action from parents whose youngster claimed another child had threatened to harm her. A review of video proved the second student was never nearby and it was the accuser who was the source of trouble. “The camera told the truth; she was the only person threatening her safety by the way she was seated,” Rosa said.
Meanwhile, Rosa recalled that she is considering the inclusion of dash and stop-arm cameras in future purchases, if local law enforcement and prosecutors are committed to pursuing violators. But, she added, “I don’t want to lose any cameras inside.”
“We can’t control what everyone else is doing around the bus, but we can control our kids. … We’ll never know how much video deters (incidents) because our drivers remind the kids of the camera and you can’t measure what doesn’t happen,” she said.
