This month, the newsletter Transporting Students with Disabilities and Special Needs wrote that an estimated 5,000 children are left alone on the school bus each year, a percentage that can begin to rival that of the overall school bus safety record in regard to how many children's lives can be affected.
When you're talking 25 million students at least riding the school bus each weekday, .0002 percent of children being forgotten can seem statistically irrelevant. Consider that, in our May magazine issue, I write about loading and unloading deaths and the fact that the spike last school year to 17 recorded deaths amounts to the slightest fraction that one can't even imagine in comparison to the at least 10 billion riders a year, at least those recognized by the industry as occurring directly as a result of boarding or egressing the school bus.
Yet, over and over, pupil transporters mention the problem of children left behind on the school bus as a growing problem when it comes to driver training. As Bob Riley, executive director of NASDPTS told Transporting Students: "It's a very serious situation."
Surely, leaving children unattended, especially very young ones, is not a good thing. Depending on the elements, a school district can quickly have on its hands a child succumbing to heat stroke or hypothermia. What's especially troubling is that so very much of pre-service and in-service driver training deals with this issue. Leaving children on the school bus is perhaps one of the most compelling reasons to for drivers to perform post-trip inspections, which should include walking the aisles and looking on and under each and every school bus seat for a sleeping child. There's even child reminder alarms available to most districts, and at the least policies for drivers to stick a placard in the window that indicates the bus is truly empty at the end of routes.
Still, far drivers forget. They are only human after all, but school districts across the nation take very seriously any incident, often firing a driver on the spot and at the very least launching an investigation, as what recently happened in Las Vegas when a deaf child was forgotten.
So I found it interesting that the "hot-button" issue of leaving children ranked only at No. 32 in a list of the most important school bus safety issues, as compiled by researchers last year for the FMCSA's Commercial Truck and Bus Synthesis of Safety Practice. The data was compiled from a survey of industry professionals, and it's quite telling. Many more people find such issues as illegal passing, on-board student behavior, student loading/unloading, driver turnover (at least among non-drivers), and driver distraction as all greater safety issues.
And who am I to say these are wrong assertions? But it should at least serve as a conversation starter when somehow attempting to rank the most important obstacles for the industry to overcome.