Back of the Bus:

Bus Driver at First Doesn't Succeed,
Tries Again and Saves Life

CLOVIS, Calif. - School bus drivers are known, at least in this industry, to play a major role in the lives of the students they transport every school day. An uneventful trip is the norm, as they keep the children safer than any other passenger vehicle on the road.

Occasionally the school bus driver comes face to face with a life or death situation that calls on his or her training. Teresa Corbin's turn came on Sept. 21 during an after school route.

Onboard with 15 fellow elementary school students, 5-year-old kindergartner Adrian Juarez-Villa grew hungry. He remembered a half-eaten hamburger in his backpack and, in Corbin's words, began "scarfing it down." The problem was Clovis Unified School District, which serves 12,000 students a day in this 198 square-mile area near Fresno, enforces a strict no-eating rule on its buses. But the small boy was seated behind Corbin in an area district drivers normally reserve for kindergartners because they tend to fall asleep and miss their stops. Corbin was unable to see that Juarez-Villa was nibbling on forbidden food because the high seatback obscured her vision.

" When they're stitting in the seat behind you, you can't see them because they're so tiny," she said. "I tell you, I don't put kindergartners in the seat behind me anymore," opting instead to seat them next to her.

Transportation Director Joe Bjerke said the cost prohibits the school district from employing monitors on regular routes, but 40 percent of the fleet is outfitted with surveillance cameras. Corbin's bus was not equipped the day of the incident.

While approaching a right-hand turn at an intersection that day, she recalled hearing a student vaguely say, "He's choking." She turned around and couldn't see anything abnormal, but her bus driver instincts kicked in and she decided to pull over to investigate.

"I shut the bus off and put keys in my pocket and turned around and saw a boy sitting behind me eyes blinking, looking like he's about to pass out," she said. "He was turning blue."

Remembering her first aid and CPR training through the local Red Cross, Corbin began performing the Heimlich maneuver on the boy to no avail. The dehydrated piece of several-hour old hamburger would not budge from his windpipe. She tried again but was unsuccessful.

"I think that's why I didn't hear him choking because nothing was getting out," said Corbin, a district driver since December of 2002.

She called dispatch requesting an ambulance. Seconds later a 9-1-1 operator was on the phone with her to assist. But things were looking bleak for Juarez-Villa as his little body struggled for breath.

The 9-1-1 dispatcher told Corbin to forcibly use her fist rather than her fingers like training dictated on a smaller child, as it was better to break a rib and dislodge the food than for the child to die. It worked. Emergency responders gave Juarez-Villa a clean bill of health. The school board recognized Corbin at an Oct. 12 meeting with a proclamation and plaque commemorating her life-saving efforts.

"I've been here for 18 years now, and this is the first time of something of this magnitude where I believe the driver's actions actually saved someone's life," said Bjerke. "Drivers everywhere do these untold acts of heroism everyday. Those types of things they do, that's just part of the job."

Since the choking incident, the boy's parents have enrolled him in preschool, but his older sister still rides Corbin's bus. The district learned that the frail little boy had open heart surgery as a baby to correct a hole in his heart. Corbin still wonders if she would have done anything differently had she known of his pre-existing condition.

"It was really good to see him the next day," Corbin said. "That first night was really tough for me. I cried all the way home."

Read about a New York school bus driver's life-saving efforts using the Heimlich maneuver, published in the November 2005 issue, at www.stnonline.com/stn/nextissue/toc_1105.htm.

Source: School Transportation News, January 2006. All rights reserved.