By Bill Paul
STN Editor & Publisher

GERMANY - The first clue that change was afoot occurred in the early 1980s, springing out of numerous indications that student transportation costs were rising out of proportion to requirements. In the ensuing years several local audits and inquiries were conducted. In 1987-88, a Department of Defense Inspector General launched a formal audit of the program. The study came at the end of the cold war when Congress had decided to cut back funding for the U.S. military.

On September 21, 1989, the IG released a report identifying excessive costs, fragmented management practices, and more, in pupil transportation at U.S. military installations throughout Europe. As reported in the February 1993 edition of School Transportation News, ("Pentagon Audit Reveals $5.1 Million Waste in German School Bus Contracts,") outrageous cost overruns were uncovered. According to the article, "The study found one route that had an average daily cost per bused student of $426.00"

A Joint Management Task Force on Student Transportation was chartered in early 1990 by then-Acting U.S. Secretary of Defense, Donald J. Atwood to examine the matter. "The JMTF wanted to stabilize the situation for transportation in Europe," explained Terry Fuglsang, chief of the unit. "When the (individual) services (Army, navy, Air Force) were in charge of transportation, operations were decentralized and localized. Every base in every military community ran its own show and the effect was several hundred independent bus 'companies.'" Fuglsang noted, "There was no one agency in charge, no single manager concept."

How important was the student transportation dilemma to the U.S. Military?

Probably the best gauge of its importance can be gathered from the fact that then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin personally approved establishment of DETMO as the central office for direction and management of the student transportation program in Europe for the three military services. DETMO began operations on May 11, 1994 with Matt Wallace, a retired Air Force colonel and former transportation director of Clark County School in Las Vegas, serving as the first chief of the new DETMO program.

Now, six years later, pupil transportation is alive and well at military bases throughout Europe and NATO. The Dept. of Defense European Transportation Office, or DETMO, functions as an element of the Department of Defense Education Activity (DoDEA).

Like school transportation in the continental U.S., school transportation in Europe has required a full-blown, active safety program to achieve these results. The fundamental difference between school bus service in the U.S. and throughout Europe is that European drivers are not required to stop for buses when they pick up or discharge children.

Wallace hired Terry Fuglsang as deputy director in January 1996. Fuglsang is a career pupil transporter who served in transportation supervisory positions in Eugene, Ore., and Modesto and Elk Grove, Calif. school districts. He was appointed chief of the DETMO program eight months later when Wallace retired.

Safety Issues
"After I'd been deputy for a short while I developed some concerns about safety issues," said Fuglsang. He said under the new central manager concept, accident patterns at all military bases in the DETMO program were tracked collectively for the first time in four decades. Similar patters began to show up. "We had several incidents of children running out in front of or behind the bus and being struck by cars because traffic doesn't stop (for buses) in Europe," he observed.

"So we saw a real need to standardize student training. We had children coming from the continental United States to Europe, and they had to unlearn, if you will, what they were being taught, namely to cross the street in front of the bus. We had to retrain them on what is appropriate in Europe."

As if the one-third annual turnover among the student population wasn't enough, the task was more daunting by the fact that DETMO doesn't hire bus drivers directly and can't supervise them directly. Instead, the agency contracts with independent bus companies. Contact with the company is through a contract manager who must be fully conversant in English in order to teach the drivers in the host nation language. Most of the drivers are full-time, professional bus drivers with experience in transit buses and tour buses.

"We needed to teach European bus drivers about how to manage U.S. students while they are riding on the bus," he said. "We wanted to apply some of the safety principles that have been tested and proven in the U.S., and incorporate these into a driver-training program."

To achieve this goal DETMO developed a set of recommended "procedures for transporting school children, on entering a bus stop, at the bus stop, leaving the bus stop, at the school site, and so on," said Fuglsang. As bus contracts came up for renewal, the procedures were incorporated into the contracts as enforceable performance work statements.

The performance work statement is a "critical document in our operation," said Mike Sieber, a DETMO spokesman. "It is our way of making sure that everybody is at least at the same minimum level. We have been kicking that minimum level up every year through every contract cycle every time we go out for bids. That's how we raised the bar on the standards."

Meanwhile, DETMO staff ensures quality control by reviewing the companies they contract with. Contractors are rated by several criteria, including financial health of the company, responsiveness to safety, deficiency reports, maintenance and service practices, etc.

Publicity Campaign
One of the important initiatives of the DETMO program is a publicity campaign. Program managers recognized early on that training parents about bus safety was as important as training the children. "We had to teach the parents that their behavior when they meet their children at the bus stop could contribute to an accident or injury to their child," said Sieber. "If parents are going to meet their kid at the bus stop, they have to stand at the bus stop and not across the street." The way to reach the parents: the media.

Throughout Europe the "home town paper" is the Stars & Stripes. DETMO buys full-page advertisements in the newspaper at the start of the school year, and throughout the year the newspaper runs public service, filler ads as space permits. DETMO receives equally supportive assistance from the Armed Forces Network, the radio and television network that supports the U.S. military overseas. Borrowing a page from U.S.-based school districts, DETMO convinced supermarkets in the commissary system to put a safety flyer in grocery bags.

The message DETMO gets out has been dubbed Take 5 for Bus Safety. The program has boiled bus safety down to five easy rules. Only of the rules, "stay in your seat," applies to children on the bus. The other four have to do with getting to the bus stop, and behavior in the loading/unloading zone.

Train the Trainer in Sacramento
As a former California-based transporter, Fuglsang was familiar with the three-week "train the trainer" program offered by the California Dept. of Education in Sacramento.

Two years ago Fuglsang sent DETMO's headquarters staff to attend the program. "I wanted staff to get the full-blown training," he said. "More importantly, I wanted them to see how the Academy developed the modules - safety assessment of routes, safety assessment of bus stops, etc. - they train by, and to learn how they developed those modules. Then to come back and develop training modules for our 31 school bus offices' staff. Again, the idea was to raise the bar of knowledge of our staff about pupil transportation."

Many DETMO staff come with logistics and transportation experience gained during their military service. Many of them even had pupil transportation experience under the old method by which each base commander set up his own pupil transportation program. But as Fuglsang noted, "They had a different attitude than the professionalism that we are striving for now. They knew how to do their job the way the Army or Air Force had done it. We have to ingrain in them a pupil transportation attitude as we have in the U.S., and get them on the wavelength of being a pupil transporter rather than somebody who moves people through an air terminal or moves freight on pallets."

By the fall of 1998 all of DETMO's headquarters and field staff had gone through the first phase of DETMO's "academy" training, modeled on the California program. Now, with a pupil transportation mentality emanating from U.S. school bus safety practices standard among staff, DETMO was in a position to implement those same practices and procedures among its bus contractors.

Managers at the contracted bus companies are now required to provide eight hours of safety and security training to all their drivers once a year. DETMO has even developed a training video in English, Dutch, French, Italian and German.

The practices implemented by Fuglsang have developed so well that DETMO is hoping to formalize a pupil transportation career field within government service overseas. The Pentagon's Office of Personnel Management job code 2150 for transportation operations specialists. DETMO hopes to develop a subset within the 2150 code that recognizes a pupil transportation career.

Town Hall Meeting
At the heart of most U.S. military communities in Europe is a town hall meeting. These meetings are America transplanted oversees, and serve as a unifying element. At these gatherings military and civilian staff and their dependents join to discuss common interests. The military community commanders, typically Army and Air Force Lt. Colonels and Navy Commanders, effectively serve at the mayor. DETMO has taken its story on the road to town hall meetings across the continent.

"These are our customers and constituents," said Sieber. "We've given briefings to military commanders and to other stakeholders and support people. The daddies and mommies of the kids are the whole reason for us doing this. In some cases it is an education process. We talk to them about the differences between school busing in the U.S. and Europe. We explain why the (highway) environment is different in Europe than America. We have made ourselves a part of the community. By doing so we can get our message out. We are beginning to build a basis of understanding about pupil transportation; what it is and what it means to the kids and their parents."

Fuglsang added, "It never stops. The community changes every year and the commanders change every two years. We not only have to preach a message that is current, we preach it because the audience changes."

Despite that, Fuglsang and the DETMO staff believe they are making progress. They point with pride to one of the most important measurements of school bus safety - accident and crash data. The 1998-99 school year was the safest in 40 years of school busing in Europe. "We had no serious injuries on or off the bus this year," said Fuglsang. "None!"

Source: Reprinted from School Transportation News,
February 1999. All rights reserved.