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Security Onboard School bus safety has taken on a new dimension in the aftermath of 9-11. This article looks at efforts to reduce the school bus industry’s vulnerability to terrorists attacks on yellow school buses! First of a two-part series; click here to read part two. By Bill Paul The March 11 bombings in Spain in which 198 people lost their lives remind us that the world remains vulnerable to terrorists. 3/11 now joins the lexicon of 9/11 as the world community continues in a death struggle with terrorism. How does what occurred in far off Spain have anything to do with the safety of your school bus operation, you ask? “School transportation professionals are and rightly should be concerned about extreme acts of violence such as terrorist and major incidents like the terrible Columbine High School attack,” said Michael Dorn , a terrorism expert, senior consultant for Jane’s Consultancy Worldwide, and former chief of police at a major urban school district. “But it is also important if not critical that they remain focused on the much more common yet quite dangerous incidents that occur on our nation’s campuses and school buses each school day.” Dorn cautions not to ignore domestic incidents of violence. Yet in the aftermath of 9/11 it became clear that school security has much broader implications than it did when domestic violence was the extent of school and transportation security concerns. Witness the spate of school shootings in recent years, and the incidents of school bus hijackings. At least four high profile hijackings have occurred in recent years. In one, a deranged school bus driver took a busload of children for an unauthorized trip from Pennsylvania to Washington , D.C. a couple of years ago. Worse yet was the school bus hijacking in Miami in 1995 where an unemployed man boarded a loaded school bus and forced the driver at gunpoint on a lengthy trek through city streets. Students have hijacked buses too in Utah , Nevada and British Columbia.
Should pupil transporters in the U.S. be concerned about a terrorist incident involving school buses? Or is this prospect beyond the realm of possibility? Without being alarmist, the answer to both questions is “yes” say the experts! Consider DeKalb County Schools in suburban Atlanta . The DeKalb County Schools has two high school clusters involved in its Emergency Evacuation Plan. The Druid Hills High School Cluster which is made up of Druid Hills High School , Shamrock Middle and seven elementary schools all are within one mile of the Center for Disease Control (CDC). The second high school cluster is near or within one mile of the Doraville Tank Farm. There are 28 tanks that hold anywhere from two million to two and a half million gallons of gasoline, oil and or diesel fuel on the Tank Farm. This Cluster is called the Cross Keys High School Cluster and is made up of Cross Keys High School , Sequoah Middle and six elementary Schools. “The FBI came to us and told us we had to be able to evacuate our Druid Hills Cluster campus of 5,300 students and staff, and 5,800 students and staff at Cross Keys, within 10 minutes,” said Dannie Reed, transportation supervisor. “We’ve practiced and we can do it. We have 73 bus drivers who do other jobs around the school site so they have full time jobs here, who are ready at a moment’s notice to load up the kids and head out.” Clearly the FBI was primarily concerned about the security of the CDC and tank farm. Due to its proximity, the FBI was also concerned about the nearby school clusters as well when it urged the DeKalb County Schools to develop an evacuation plan.
Meanwhile, a survey conducted by National School Safety and Security Services, a private company, of more than 650 school-based police officers in July 2002 found that 95 percent of respondents believed their schools were vulnerable to a terrorist attack while 79 percent of officers felt their district was not adequately prepared to respond to a terrorism attack. Federal Jurisdiction School bus security came under direct federal purview when President Bush signed H.R. 3162 shortly after 9/11. The measure, part of the administration’s broad anti-terrorism initiative, includes the word “schoolbus” under the federal definition of a mass transportation system. Under the law, terrorist acts and other violent crimes against any mass transportation system may be investigated, tried and punished as a federal crime. The law also addresses the use of biological or chemical agents, as well as other destructive substances or devices, on or near mass transportation vehicles (read that as school bus) or facilities (read that as bus yard or shop). In its initial effort to address school bus security, last summer the Transportation Security Administration of the Department of Homeland Security published a pamphlet outlining steps pupil transporters could take to help prevent a terrorist strike at a school bus. Separately, the administration has already provided assistance to the motorcoach and public transit industries to develop security plans, though the bulk of attention has obviously been to airline security. “Highway Passenger Security Schoolbus” outlines dozens of recommended preventative measures for school bus drivers to help reduce vulnerability to potential incidents for themselves and their passengers. Among the recommendations are ideas for identifying security threats, identifying suspicious people, monitoring suspicious activities and items, responding to a security incident, reporting suspicions to dispatch, the operations center or law enforcement, etc. There is more to come.
“The school bus industry is an open environment,” he said. “Lots of schools have emergency response and security plans following Columbine. They need to incorporate school buses into their planning when they prepare security plans for their schools.” Dorn, who has reviewed scores of school safety plans, concurs. “Unfortunately, the vast majority of school systems and private schools do not have anything close to adequate plans to address transportation incidents and even fewer properly integrate these concerns into their overall (safety) plans,” he said. John Green Meet John Green, state director of pupil transportation with the Office of School Transportation in the California Department of Education. His interest in school bus security is not theoretical.
a $5 million ransom — were apprehended. They continue to serve life sentences in a California prison. To this day, Green notes, buses remain a favorite target of terrorists. According to the FBI, between 1920 and 2000, nearly 40 percent of mass transit targets internationally were buses; subways and trains account for 26 percent, while bus terminals and subway/train stations account for 12 percent. Tragically, in the last two years, school buses with children on board have been targeted in Israel , Thailand and Malaysia . Green sounded the security alarm during the NASDPTS conference in Salt Lake City last November. In a compelling presentation, he cited school bus hijackings and other incidents over the past three decades and outlined some fundamental principles to develop a system security plan. “System security is the use of operating principles to reduce the security vulnerabilities of a passenger transportation system to the lowest practical level,” he said. The most common misconception about security and terrorism, he said, is that “it can’t happen to me But it can.” Why would terrorists target a school bus? Certainly school children present no danger to them. “Purely from a terrorist’s perspective, there would be no more effective way to crush the heart of America than to target our children where they should be the most safe,” said Bill Dolphin, a school security expert, in an Internet report to Texas educators. “School transportation systems are vulnerable because we are so predictable,” said Green, echoing comments by Commiato of the TSA. “The public is certainly aware of school buses, aware of whom we are, who our passengers are. That’s the nature of our business, its very predictability.” Technology Solutions Technology is one weapon in America ’s arsenal in the war against terrorism. Video cams and GPS, for example, are two of the primary technologies that enhance school bus security. Hundreds of thousands of school buses are equipped with video cams; how often video cams are used to scan maintenance facilities and bus yards is unknown. GPS, in combination with routing and scheduling software, permits transportation managers to pinpoint the location of their buses at any given moment. No one should assume however the bad guys can’t bend our technology to their use. Consider school districts posting their school bus routes to the Internet. While the practice is of enormous benefit to parents and administrators, it offers opportunities to mischief-makers as well. Not only does the practice clearly identify for anyone where and when a school bus will be at a given moment, armed with that information “it would not be hard to do” an incident, said Green. Indeed, Americans are so trusting of school buses that no one would question a yellow bus parked next to any public building. Or for that matter question a yellow school bus driving onto any campus property. “Someone could drive a yellow school bus into a school district and no one would think about it. People don’t have any fear of school buses,” said Green. In a presentation to the State Directors Association in Salt Lake City last fall, Green urged his colleagues to adopt the neighborhood watch concept to help counter potential threats. “Those who live or work in an environment know it best,” he said. “Be alert, you are the eyes, ears and mouth of the agency. Note suspicious people, activities, packages, devices and substances. Report things that do not seem right.” Green outlined several steps that should be considered in preparing for the possibility of a terrorist attack on a school bus. Among them:
“Security has to be system wide,” said Green, “it needs to be integrated at all levels.” System-wide security would include ID badges, procedures for not letting vendors wander through your shop, not allowing people to arbitrarily drive and part in the back of your bus yard, making sure gates to the bus yard are closed, and so on, he said. Developing a transportation safety plan is a complicated, intricate process. “It can’t be done in isolation and has to be integrated into the school safety plan,” said Dorn. Hopefully the dreaded day that a terrorist group — foreign or domestic — strikes a U.S. school bus will never occur. Tips such as these contained in this article and elsewhere should cause everyone involved in school bus safety to develop a heightened state of awareness. Green concluded his presentation to state directors last fall by stressing the emotional and psychological impact to America of a terrorist incident involving school buses and the children on board. “I can’t imagine a more devastating event than terrorists targeting four school buses somewhere in America at the same hour on a Monday morning,” he said. His prescient comment foreshadowed the enormous tragedy that befell Spain on 3/11. Part 2 of this series will report what various states and school districts are doing to ensure the security of their school bus operations. * Michael Dorn and Sonayia Shepherd will present several sessions on various aspects of school security at the 2004 STN EXPO in Reno this summer, including a 4-hour workshop outlining the protocols of school bus security and how a transportation security plan can be integrated with the school safety plan. * John Green will present a workshop on “System Security Awareness for Transportation Employees” at the 2004 STN EXPO Conference in Reno this summer. It will be an updated version of his presentation to NASDPTS last fall. * Dan Commiato of the TSA will participate in panel discussions and update school bus transporters on moves by the federal government to provide more assistance to the industry. Reprinted with permission from the April 2004 edition of School Transportation News. All rights reserved. Copyright by STN Media, Inc. |
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