On 2025-03-22 1:38 PM, BTR1701 wrote:
Thought the former bus drivers here might be interested.
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/1877040513284481024/pu/vid/avc1/720x1280/RaE_08ezYUrR7wI9.mp4?tag=12
When I saw your subject line, I assumed the driver had hit the brakes to
avoid a collision and was horrified at the thought that he had been
charged for doing something that might have saved lives. But the video
made clear that he had done it to teach the kids that they needed to be
seated properly to avoid being hurt.
I can really sympathize with his desire to educate those kids. Kids,
especially elementary school age kids but even senior high school kids,
mostly have no idea of their own mortality. I was the same at that age
and did some really stupid things that could have got me hurt or killed.
For instance, I'd sometimes make lane changes on my motorcycle without
checking what was behind me in the new lane. When I was driving school
buses, I had the "stay-seated" talk with my kids a few times but I'm not
sure it ever really sunk in.
I remember a particular student who had a tendency to get up and visit
people in other seats and I'd warned him before. On one occasion, I
asked him to stay on the bus for a minute after the other kids had gone
into the school and asked him if he knew what would happen to him if I
had to hit the brakes hard while he was standing. I said "You would
become a projectile and bounce around. You might hit another student and
hurt them and you could very well hurt yourself very badly." I seem to
recall that he wandered less after that.
A driver on another bus was having a lot of trouble getting one
particular student to sit still. He or she had had their fill of it and
finally our supervisor said *she'd* take that bus the next afternoon and
put the kid in his place via the techniques she'd learned. Well, she
used every trick she knew, including pulling over to the side of the
road and declaring that the bus wasn't moving until he sat down and she
still couldn't get the kid to sit the heck down. (That technique is
supposed to get the other kids to put peer pressure on the troublesome
one and sometimes works.) Finally, yet another driver was given that
bus. (I'm not sure if she asked to have it or got pressured to do it.)
Anyway, *that* driver solved the problem very conclusively by telling
the student that she'd lost her own husband in a horrible accident in
which he was decapitated. The kid behaved after that and was a total
angel. Initially, I assumed she had just concocted a scary story to make
the kid behave but she assured me that it had really happened!
As for slamming the brakes without an emergency, that seems excessive
and I'm not surprised he got fired although the criminal charges seem a
bit much given that no one got hurt beyond a bloody nose. But America is
a very litigious country so I suppose this could not be avoided. (I'm
assuming a parent or parents demanded criminal charges.) Mind you, I'm
not sure child abuse is the most appropriate charge: careless driving
might make more sense.
Mind you, I did something vaguely in the same territory myself once. All
my kids were seated except one, the same one I mentioned above in the "projectile" paragraph. I decided to educate him a little by putting the
brakes on: not hard but quite noticeably. I wanted him to understand
that his balance could be affected by my using the brakes and that this
could cause him to lose his balance and maybe get hurt as a result. This
was one of the first times he was out of his seat so my "lesson" didn't
really sink in since it took some further events before he finally
settled down.
Of course, we had other tools to urge kids to behave. One of my powers
was to "write someone up", i.e. fill out a little form, leave it at the
school office, and then *maybe* the principal or vice-principal would
have a talk with the kid. On one occasion, I wrote up a kid that had
never given me a minute of trouble before. He'd gotten up to go talk to
his brother in a nearby seat, just a couple of minutes before we would
have reached the school. We weren't on a highway but were on a major
road close to highway speeds. I had him stay aboard after the others had
left and told him I was writing him up. He asked if I could possibly
make it a warning instead but I shook my head. I probably would have
done just that if he'd been a young but he was in Grade 12 so he was
graduating high school that year. By that age, a kid should be smart
enough to stay seated. I don't know if he ever got talked to by the
principal or v-p.
At one point, I had a talk with my supervisor to see if there was any
way to get seat belts installed on every bus, or even just on one or two
seats. She pointed out that Toronto had seat belts on every school bus -
some kind of municipal regulation - but that if the bus had seat belts
(for the kids, the driver always has one), the driver was also
responsible for making sure the kids used them, which would get
challenging at times. On a morning run, how could you make sure that
each student did their seat belt as they sat down? On an afternoon run,
how could you make sure they didn't undo their belts after getting under
way? The driver is too busy driving to supervise potentially dozens of
belts. I would still have liked seat belts in one or two positions on my
bus so that kids who wandered out of their seats could be made to sit in
one of the seats with seat belts, which I would have in the very first
row so I could keep an eye on them. Hopefully, that would educate the
wanderers and help them break the habit so that they could return to
their regular seats (without belts) after a day or two.
Mind you, I had fun on one occasion when my bus had to go in for service
and they gave me another one, a bus that had been driven over from
Toronto, meaning that it had seat belts on every seat. I'd already had
to admonish some kids for not sitting in their seats, especially this
one kid, so when I showed up at the school in the substitute bus, my
kids immediately asked if they were being punished for previous
indiscretions :-)
At the time, I genuinely wished every bus had belts on every seat just
so that the kids would all be seated properly and secure in the event of
a collision. Later, I learned some things that changed my perspective a
bit. I saw safety videos that said that school buses are just about the
safest places to be in the event of a collision, even without seat
belts. Apparently, seat belts haven't really been shown to help in most collisions involving school buses because the surfaces are nearly all
heavily padded. (City transit buses have a LOT more hard surfaces.)
--
Rhino
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