You shouldn’t compare him to morons. It insults the morons.
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Exactly. Many years ago the official medical levels of retardation were Moron, Idiot, Cretan, and another I don’t recall. By the time I was working in a state institution for retarded people in 1970 they had been changed to 1) mild, 2) moderate, 3) severe, and 4) profound. This was because the original levels had become common insults in our language.
The school bus driver’s very questionable driving record led me to a possible requirement of only re-testing “bad drivers”. Testing every driver when they renew their license would of course be far to expensive. Not a solution but something that could be fair and possibly help get some bad drivers off the road. A suspension of driver license for any reason would require passing a written and driving test prior to the license being restored. In my state DUI, driving while suspended, and reckless driving convictions result in automatic suspension of one year. Of course this can be reduced for various reasons. Do away with that! Second DUI conviction (slow learner) should result in permanently revoked driving privilege. 13 driver license suspensions + driving while suspended, 8 speeding tickets, 5 accidents, and driving a school bus? Shaking my head! Many school districts now own and maintain the busses but drivers are employees of a contractor who makes money by filling the bus driver seats. So sad.
If a driver with a long record of poor driving and repeated moving violations is allowed to drive a school bus, how can anybody believe that requiring people with long, clean records of good driving and no violations is going to solve anything? This guy should never have been on the road, never mind driving a school bus. Let’s fix what’s wrong with the system before trying to fix what isn’t. Let’s address the flaws that allow guys like this driver continue to drive, even drive a school bus, before forcing those with good records to jump additional hurdles.
Let’s fix what’s broken before fixing what isn’t.
In NY every School Bus Driver is required to take a written and driving test given by his employer every other year. Every driver gets 2 hours of safety training every year. New drivers have to complete a 30 hour training course in the first year. My district made you complete it before you worked as a driver.You have to have a physical, provide an abstract of your driving record, provide three letters of reference that you are pf good character, and pass a physical performance test before you drive. My district got the abstract themselves directly from the DMV so you could not “doctor” it. And, I almost forgot, you have to be fingerprinted and have a criminal background check done, You are also subject to random drug testing and mandatory drug and alcohol testing after an accident.
I don’t think any of these requirements applied to teachers.
My district drove every elementary student from and to his house and we had to observe them get inside. It did not matter how close to the school they lived. I picked up students that had a gate in their back fence that opened directly into the school grounds about 60 feet fron the main door. If we cut back to state mandated busing limits we could have done with half our drivers. Unfortunately, we live in such a climate of fear these days that almost all parents are afraid to let their children walk anywhere even though the FBI says that stranger danger is no worse than it ever was.
My former neighbor had a CDL and in Minnesota he complained about losing his CDL if you had a violation on a snow mobile. They used to have great fun running snow mobiles from bar to bar out in the country. At any rate, it you can lose a CDL for something like that, can’t you also lose your bus driver endorsement? I really don’t know but seems like they both should have similar penalties.
A bus license is a class2 CDL with a P endorsement unless you are driving only empty buses. U nless it is for an articulated bus which is a class1. In NY you also need a 19 A certification for school buses which is a state requirement.
In Ny, like most states the legat limitwor driving a commercial vehicle or bus is .04. Interestingly, if you are under 21 in NY state driving with a regular license it is .02.
They must figure that experienced drivers can drive safely with more booze in them than inexperienced drivers. 
IMHO nobody with even a single drink in them should be driving a schoolbus. Nor should anybody with a long history of moving violations. Our children and grandchildren are just too valuable for that to be happening.
I acknowledge that schoolbus drivers are hard to get. Perhaps we should be looking at improving the job parameters rather than compromising our children’s safety.
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That may mean a tax increase. Are you ready for that?
I don’t have a problem with drinking legally and driving, but I agree with you about school bus drivers being alcohol free while on the job. If they had been drinking, even a legal amount, that would be deeply concerning given the time of day school bus drivers work. IMO, alcohol and work don’t mix and no one, especially commercial drivers, should drink on the job. That includes a tipple at lunch.
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I think .08 is pretty low and .04 for commercial is even lower but .02 might be reached with the after affects of Nyquil. I really have no idea what it would take but that seems pretty low.
Under 21 .02 may be a halfhearted concession due to the legal drinking age in NY being 18 until 1982.
Driving a school bus is not the easiest job in the world with the noisy kids, particularly when the pay is not very good. My son drove s school bus one summer to transport kids to summer school. The school was really fussy. Every morning he not only had to check the lights and test the brakes, but he had to check the oil, transmission fluid and coolant levels. Before that, as a sophomore in college, he was on an internship in Appalachian country of eastern Kentucky. He transported children on treacherous mountain roads in a 15 passenger van. I rode with him and the kids when we went down to visit him. He wouldn’t start the engine until he made certain that every child had his or her seat belt buckled. When my son took a teaching position at a private school, the administration wanted someone to drive their bus. My son didn’t tell them that he had a CDL. The amount the school wanted to pay was low and he figured the school would have him transporting kids on field trips and teams to athletic events. He would have been perfect for the job–a clean driving record and is a non-drinker. Yet, he said the.last thing he wanted to do was drive a school bus.
However, perhaps a source of bus drivers might be school teachers. In the public school I attended in the late 40s through the mid 1950s, most of the bus drivers were oener/operators. However, there was a garage that did own a couple of buses and two of the younger teachers drove the buses for extra income. They would pick up the buses in the morning, transport themselves and the kids to school, leave the bus in the school parking lot, then transport the kids and themselves back home in the evening.
That’s not necessarily true. But the issue does need to be studied. Improving the job may be able to be done with better scheduling, or with ways to better attract retired people, or through some changes other than raising pay. Never having driven a schoolbus, I don’t know enough about it, but IMHO only people with clean records should be driving schoolbusses.
I agree as regards the bus driver portion of the post, however I think a record of repeated DUIs in their personal vehicles should definitely disqualify a person from this job. Alcohol is a terrible addiction, but it IS and addiction, and IMHO those with it should not be driving schoolbusses unless perhaps they’re in a program like AA and have a years-long record of sobriety. The details of how that would all work I don’t know, but no alcoholic without a record of having long term control over it should be driving schoolbusses.
Perhaps Triedaq has provided some ideas by offering descriptions of alternatives. Perhaps there’s a way that some of the bus driving workload could be made part of full time positions. I don’t know; as I said I don’t know enough about it, but some option other than hiring anybody willing to drive the bus should be looked at.
A big reason for the shortage of bus drivers is fear. It is usually couched as fear of kidnapping but is really more a fear of custodial interference from a non custodial spouse, boyfriend or unmarried parent. in a custody dispute. I know it is politically correct to pretend otherwise but in reality, in the majority of cases it is the mother trying to stop the male figure from contact with the child, either because of genuine fear or using the children as pawns .
I don’t know why the schools have put themselves in the position of being responsible for children until they see them actually delivered to a parent. Parents know when children are dismissed and they are the ones who should be responsible for them.
If the district I worked for stopped dropping every elementary school child at their house instead of a bus stop, and cut back to state mandated distance limits for who needed transportation, they would have needed less than half the drivers.
It is much healthier for children to walk to school and back than to be driven by bus or parent.
There is another kind of fear, IMHO.
All too often, bus drivers in our district were not supported by our gutless school administrators when the drivers reported students who were disruptive and/or abusive on their bus. Just try driving that same group of students the next day, after the school’s principal or vice-principal threw you under your own bus, rather than offend parents with notification of their kids’ bad behaviors.
@VDCdriver You hit the nail on the head. These gutless administrators don’t support teachers either. Most state laws make the school district responsible from the time the student gets on the bus to go to school until the student leaves the bus at his or her residence.
In my school bus riding days, the bus drivers could discipline the students on the bus and were backed up by the principal. There was fear of being sent to the principal either by a bus driver or a teacher.
I remember one incident where the driver thought we were too noisy on the bus. He stopped the bus and told us that our conduct on the school bus would affect our grades as he would talk to each of our teachers and have these teachers lower our grades. One student, named Barney started laughing. “What’s so funny?” the driver shouted. Barney replied “My grades are so low they can’t get any lower”. He was probably right.
One Christmas tradition on each bus was that an upper classman would take up a collection to buy a gift for the driver. In turn, the drivers would give a box of candy to each student as he or she got off the bus. At any rate, because of the school administration, the bus drivers and teachers were respected.
It starts at home. Parents back in my day backed the teachers, bus drivers and just about any other adult that told them we were misbehaving. You never heard- my johnny would never do that. They knew better and when you got home there was h@ll to pay depending on the level of transgression.
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As a former teacher and high school counselor… trust me… I am well aware of how all-too- many administrators throw teachers under the bus as often as they do the same to school bus drivers.
That’s probably why every school zone is a traffic jam where I live. All the parents dropping off their pampered offspring at the school entrance waiting in a block long line in order to do so. I even change my route to work during school season to detour the worst of the school traffic.
We didn’t used to have 24-7 sensationalized news coverage by cable news channels to make us scared of our own shadows.
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