Editor’s note: This article originally appeared in Campus Safety Magazine.
Most classroom doors have locks that can help keep out intruders. School buses aren’t afforded the same luxury due to the nature of how they operate, constantly letting students on and off. That’s when schools must rely on employee training and technology to enhance student safety.
Years ago, in Liberty, Mo., an intruder made his way onto a school bus filled with students. The bus driver followed training protocol and was able to get the man off the bus. She then drove to a safe location and called police. That same intruder then tried to get on a second school bus but the driver also followed their training. Police were dispatched to the area and the suspect was taken into custody. No one was hurt.
“Every summer, we would train drivers on how to deal with intruders on the school bus. The school safety director would have his people come over and conduct a training on how to maintain the safety of the bus,” Jeff Baird, a former transportation manager for the Liberty Public School District 53, told Campus Safety. Baird now works for Transportant, a solution used by the district. “We made it known that to step on a bus was against guidelines in the law. We took that pretty seriously but we never used it…until we did. And this is a story you won’t hear about because it worked.”
Sharing Student Medical Concerns with School Bus Drivers
In training, school bus drivers are taught that their priority is ensuring students get to and from school safely, which means their main focus must be on the road in front of them.
“To put it into perspective, we drove 1.2 million miles a year, which is to the moon and back a couple times. We would take 6,000 kids a day, 174 days a year, so that’s 600,000 kids on buses total. Every district does that all year long, so the more we can do training-wise to keep drivers focused on the road, the better we can be,” said Baird. “A little distraction can go a long way towards lowering the quality and safety of the ride, so our job as managers is to keep their head in the game with the little details that they need to be safe.”
These “little details” include ensuring school bus drivers are made aware of students who may have medical needs so they can keep a watchful eye. Liberty was able to do this using student ID cards used as part of the school bus safety system.
“Two years ago, we had 1,200 out of 13,000 kids with medical-specific concerns that we needed to make aware to the bus drivers. We did that by tagging the student so that when they sign into the bus with their cards, the tag shows up to the drive only that shows, ‘Prone to seizures’ or something like that,” Baird described. “We had a student that was having silent seizures, and so we were able to inform the driver up front what the characteristics were. And when that started, the driver turned the bus off, told the kids to stay put, got the kid outside the bus, laid ’em down, tended to ’em until EMTs got there. You could see the student being cared for in the doorway camera.”
The Benefits of School Bus Video Surveillance
School buses are often breeding grounds for bullying.
“You’ve got 55 kids on the bus and their leader has their back to them,” said Baird.
Some motorists also do not respect school bus laws, putting both the school bus occupants, themselves, and other motorists in danger. Because of this, many school districts have turned to technology, particularly solutions that offer video surveillance. Baird says the solution his district used helped not only with investigations but also bus driver retention.
“People say, ‘Well, do you pay them enough?’ First thing we have to do is engage them and include them in on what we’re doing — good management skills. The second thing is their needs have to matter. When I got to [the district] I said, ‘What do you need from me?’ and they would say, ‘I want you to have my back.’ I said, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ ‘Well, this happened and they didn’t support me,’” he said. “So we had a system that I left there with that when something happened, we pulled video, we went over it with the driver, we looked at it together, we cooperated, and we came to the same conclusion. It wasn’t a discussion from differing view points — it was in front of us on the video.”
The school bus safety solution used by the district also allowed for live streaming video.
“I could sit at my desk and be on any bus at any time observing any situation. We had a bus get rear-ended with a hit and run, and I was in the bus on the video before anything happened,” Baird described. “We actually could see the car, get a description, the driver got the license, and within 17 minutes the police had the car apprehended based on the direction he turned. And that’s unheard of, but I could also look in at the five cameras and see that no kids were hurt. So that is worth a lot.”
Watch or listen to the full interview here.
