By: Peter Mannella, NAPT Public Policy Liaison
School bus drivers are on the front line in our mission to ensure safe rides to school for 25 million American children each day.
Our front line.
Without them, those children would need to find other ways to access their education.
Our front line.
For the most part, when they pull out of the school bus lot on their routes, they are alone with their students in rural, suburban and urban environments.
Again, they are our front line.
They deserve our every effort to ensure their safety and security on their own behalf and on behalf of the children we ask them to transport safely.
But they are not always safe and secure while in that very special seat on the school bus. It seems that all too often they are verbally or physically assaulted or attacked by students or parents or the public in general.
NAPT believes it is vital to our drivers and our students that we ask questions, consider causes, explore solutions and, ultimately, strengthen the profession of school bus driver in the long term.
What We Know: From the Headlines
Much of what we have learned is anecdotal in nature, but the anecdotes are frequent and substantive enough to have gained our attention over the years. In fairness, we note that there are incidents of drivers acting inappropriately with students and students assaulting one another. Those are the subject of future conversations and articles. This article focuses on incidents involving violence against school bus drivers. Our search for examples yielded these kinds of headlines:
• Jan. 2024: Parent charged in alleged assault on school bus driver (Newburgh NY)
• Dec. 2023: Bus driver allegedly assaulted by parent (Dayton OH)
• April 2024: Arizona mother violently assaults school bus driver (Mesa AZ)
• March 2023: Parent allegedly assaults school bus driver (Boston MA)
• Feb. 2024: Student assaults Colorado school bus driver (Jefferson Co. CO)
• Dec. 2022: Boston school bus driver attacked by student (Boston MA)
And we all remember January 2013, when school bus driver, Charles Poland, was shot and killed while bravely protecting the children on his bus. So, these are not isolated incidents, and they are not insignificant in nature. Drivers have been subjected to attacks while performing their duties for our schools, families and children.
Impact Potential
The impacts from such acts of violence affect our mission on several levels:
• Attacking a bus driver puts their student riders in harm’s way either due to potential injury by the perpetrator or by distraction of the driver while driving the bus
• Creates a hostile and demoralizing environment for school bus drivers which can affect retention on the job
• Makes driving a school bus less desirable as individuals wonder why they would put themselves in that position
Any one of those impacts would raise alarms in other professions. Taken collectively, they are potentially devastating to our mission of ensuring a “world where every student has access to safe and efficient transportation” (NAPT Vision).
State Initiatives
In discussions among our NAPT Public Policy Committee members, we have learned about initiatives that several states have launched that address this issue in part. They range from criminalizing actions to including school bus behavior in school codes of conduct to ensure they are covered to enacting laws to protect the drivers and penalize those who would harm them.
Based on preliminary research, the following reflect a sampling of efforts at the state level:
Disruption of or Impeding Progress of a School Bus
• Texas
• South Carolina
• North Carolina
• Michigan
Assault on a School Bus Driver
• Illinois
• North Carolina
• Georgia
• Texas
• Florida
• California
• New York
• Ohio
• Pennsylvania
Boarding a School Bus
• North Carolina
• Ohio
We believe there are more such initiatives, and we will be conducting a more extensive inventory of them in the coming months as part of our overall effort on this topic.
Committee’s Objectives
The NAPT Public Policy Committee is working on a series of ideas and initiatives to present to the NAPT Board of Directors. It is important that we be more fully informed (see survey below) but some concepts are readily apparent, including:
• Including bus driver protection and behavior standards in school codes of conduct
• Providing training for drivers and attendants in behavior management, incident response, and self-defense
• Establishing crimes related to violent behavior and actions on school buses akin to provisions for other public servants
• Providing education and information for parents and students related to the safety significance of school bus drivers and our expectations for behavior on the school bus
• Increasing our efforts to extol the professionalism and importance of school bus drivers and of the school bus as a part of the school community
This article intends to call attention to the existing and (we expect) increasing problem and to gather information and experiences from our members.
Share your Experiences
As noted, it is important to the Committee and the NAPT Board that we understand how extensive this problem really is and what impact it has on our members’ operations and driver experiences.
We have developed a brief Survey Monkey that will give us some baseline information and direct our next steps and advocacy efforts. It should take you 10 minutes or less to complete but it will mean a great deal to our work and to your colleagues nationally.
Survey Link
To complete the Survey Monkey survey, CLICK HERE and THANK YOU for taking time to help us in this effort for our members and our industry!