(Aug. 13, 2007) — Rep. Bob Etheridge is a friend of the school bus industry. The former superintendent of the North Carolina Public Department of Instruction often stops to have coffee with local bus drivers on his way to work.

The National School Transportation Association identified Etheridge, the lone Democrat on the House Homeland Security Committee, as a key person to target in the industry’s efforts to include school bus language into the recently passed 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007. The law was signed by President Bush on Aug. 3 and requires recommendations for securing the nation’s infrastructures from terrorist attacks. A key portion of the bill is Section 1358, which mandates the Transportatoin Security Administration to perform a representative threat assessment of national school bus fleet.

The ball got rolling on the school bus language to the bill last fall in Kansas City during the 2006 NASDPTS Annual Conference.

“We spent a fair amount of time on what we as directors saw as immediate security needs,” recalled Derek Graham, NASDPTS president and the state director for North Carolina. “We were able to put that together as part of the legislation package along with NSTA and NAPT. We had heard from the NSTA that we at least had to know what we were asking for.”

To get Etheridge involved, NSTA contacted Ken Hedgecock, the vice president of sales and marketing at Thomas Built Buses in High Point. He, in turn, appealed to Graham to make the official contact.

Graham worked for Etheridge when the congressman was the state superintendent at the Department of Public Instruction in the early- and mid-1990s. Dr. Ben Matthews, the state’s director of school support and Graham’s boss, has also worked with Etheridge on school construction legislation.

“He’s obviously a huge supporter of public education, and we didn’t have to explain exactly what this is about,” said Graham. “This is certainly a very nice first step. It puts a federal agency in the position of oversight and validating things we already know.”

The new law can be found online at http://thomas.loc.gov by searching for bill number “HR1”.