BY NATE SMITH AND MANDY LOEHR, EXAMINER STAFF WRITERS
nsmith@examiner.org, mloehr@examiner.org
As time-consuming as it may seem to occasionally follow a school bus picking up or dropping off pupils before or after school, consequences for failure to obey bus traffic laws are far more inconvenient, and potentially harmful to life and property.
Public school safety administrators, along with area law enforcement agencies are issuing reminders to motorists this week during National School Bus Safety Week to watch out for school buses making frequent stops and to always obey bus traffic signals.
School bus traffic violations result in a mandatory municipal court summons, Logan County Sheriff Randy Dodds said. He estimates the sheriff’s office fields upwards of 10 bus safety complaints in a given school year.
Deputies rely on information provided by school bus drivers to follow up on complaints and/or potential violations. Law enforcement will track full or partial license plate numbers provided by bus drivers in an attempt to make contact with individuals suspected violations such as failing to stop for a school bus.
Officers of the Bellefontaine Police Department have fielded 13 school bus complaints so far in the 2019-20 school year.
“Over the course of a school year, the police department investigates several school bus complaints that originate from the bus drivers. Primarily, the violations reported are motorists not stopping for a stopped school bus, or after the red flashers have been activated,” Chief Brandon Standley said.
“All motorists have to know that the drivers are doing the best they can in monitoring the students on the bus, while watching for distracted motorists not obeying the law. It is a very serious traffic offense to not follow our school bus traffic laws.”
“We had one incident where a driver passed a school bus on the right, going down in the ditch, and then coming back up on the road once they had cleared the front of the bus,” Chief Rick Core said.
“I can tell you with our department, when you put a whole bus load of kids at risk, we don’t give out a warning, we issue citations.”
Bellefontaine City Schools Transportation Supervisor Tammie Garman related that the National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration statistics show that the school bus is the safest form of transportation to and from school.
According to NHTSA, students are about 70 times more likely to arrive to school safely when taking a school bus, rather than the family car, she related. Ohio’s school bus drivers rank among the top states in the nation for safely transporting its students to and from school.
“Bellefontaine City School bus drivers are trained to keep student safety as their daily number one goal,” Garman said. “Drivers complete many hours of training to acquire their bus driving license as well as an extensive re-certification process every 6 years to maintain the license. Drivers must also attend a 4 hour refresher course annually just before the start of each school year.”
The district currently has 13 full time drivers, nine certified sub drivers and 10 individuals certified to drive the school van.
In another local bus safety measure, West Liberty-Salem Schools Board of Education members recently approved a motion that will enable the district to install cameras on the stop signs located on the side of school buses. The cameras will be able to monitor any traffic violations.
The first school buses date back to 1886 and were horse-drawn carriages known as “school hacks” or “kid hacks” and were made by a company called Wayne Works.
The first all-metal bus was built in 1921 by Blue Bird. By 1956, the National Transportation Safety Board made “chrome yellow” the official school bus color so that the vehicles would stand out to motorists.
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