Unforgettable

The training and technology that keeps drivers checking for students

By David Wegbreit

In Foxboro, Mass., a 6-year-old student is left on the bus for seven hours. In Osceola County, Fla., a 3-year-old special needs student is found wandering around the bus depot. In Hendersonville, Tenn., a 7-year-old woke up alone when a child alert alarm went off after the bus ran out of gas. In St. Louis, a driver is fired for trying to sneak a 4-year-old into class after forgetting to check the bus at the end of a run.

The lesson from just a few stories that made news in just one month’s time? Some drivers are not conducting a post-trip inspection. Every time one of these incidents hits the papers, Debbi Gerdes from Doran Manufacturing gets calls from surrounding school districts. They want information on the company’s Sleeping Child Check Monitor.

Alarm systems like Doran’s require drivers to walk to the back of the bus to press a button to prevent an alarm from sounding. The hope is that a driver forced to deactivate an alarm will check each row of seats in the process.

“Just getting a driver to walk back in the first place is a huge deal,” said William Brinton, Zonar Systems’s senior vice president of marketing.

According to Brinton, no child has been left behind in any of the 30,000 buses that have had Zonar’s system installed in the last five years. The idea is to prevent drivers from becoming too comfortable with the child check process. To verify that they’ve checked for children at the end of the route, drivers must remove a handheld Zonar RFID reader from a cradle at the front of the bus and walk to the back to scan a quarter-sized RFID tag. If they skip this, a cellular transmitter sends a text message to transportation supervisors. One Arizona district has even wired its system to set off a strobe light in the office if the child check isn’t properly completed. This process can stop drivers from sleepwalking through the child check, Brinton said.

But technology alone does not seem to solve the problem. Some of the buses on which these incidents occurred were equipped with electronic child alert systems. So what more can pupil transporters do?

FirstStudent recently attempted to address this through a campaign emphasizing to drivers the child check process. All First’s buses are equipped with Child Check Mate’s alert, but the contractor is also working to change how drivers think about the active child-check process.

“Sleeping child occurrences act like water. They will find the crack in your preventative measures,” said Gary Catapano, First’s senior vice president of safety. “If you’re not culturally enforcing the importance of these provisions, the water will find its way to the crack and a sleeping child event will occur. When you say ‘do a child check,’ it really doesn’t describe to the driver what they’re supposed to be doing.”

Catapano said First’s new “I Care, I Search” program encourages drivers to do more than just check for children but to search for sleeping children underneath seats. Managers also deliver daily messages to drivers via two-way radio reminding them to search at the end of each route. During times when children are most likely to fall asleep — before and after holidays or during time changes — drivers hear messages more often.

This jibes with the core message of the Pupil Transportation Safety Institute, reflected in its one-hour training program “Out of Sight, Out of Mind.”

“Most drivers cannot conceive in their mind of ever (doing) it — so they fail to prevent it,” said Kathy Furneaux, PTSI’s executive director.

While John Bettis, director of transportation for Washington County Public Schools in Ohio, located between Columbus and Pittsburgh, has electronic child alert systems and video cameras on some his buses. He said the best tool for making sure all drivers on his 52 routes check the bus is a simple, plastic “EMPTY” sign. At the end of each route, drivers move the sign from the front of the bus to the rear. If Bettis or his assistant don’t see a sign on a bus, the driver will get what Bettis calls a “nasty gram” in their inbox.

Bettis said this system, combined with regularly reminding drivers to check, has worked well. In 10 years of transporting nearly 4,000 students daily, Bettis has had only a few minor problems and no child left on the bus catastrophes.

Arby Creach, director of operations support for Orange County Public Schools in Orlando, Fla., has a similar philosophy. He utilizes electronic child alert systems on one-fifth of his buses and video systems that continue recording for 10 minutes after the bus has been shut off, proving whether or not a driver has checked the bus. But Creach said getting drivers to check is about appealing to driver’s emotions, not gadgetry.

“When you go out and you show pictures of darling children and then you talk about stories of children being abducted or being left alone, you’re not going to have a dry eye in the house,” Creach said. “You’ve got to make it personal, otherwise they just become a cargo.”

What Some States are Doing:

Colorado: District must have a procedure to insure that no students are left on the bus. How they do that is up to them.

Connecticut: Provides optional policy for districts that want to install electronic empty bus indicators.

Georgia: All new buses must have child check alarms.

Illinois: Law requires each districts have a policy to ensure no child is left on the bus.

North Carolina: All new buses must come with a system requiring the driver to walk to the back of the bus before exiting if the red lights have been activated while the bus has been on.

Tennessee: A state board of education policy requires all new buses purchased after 2006 have electronic child alert systems.