What are Centre County schools doing to make students safer on buses and at bus stops?

In the past two months, a string of fatal incidents involving children being struck by cars at their school bus stops started a national conversation about how school districts, parents and communities can preserve student safety while waiting for, boarding or disembarking the school bus.

While statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration show that students are 70 times more likely to get to school safely by taking the school bus, between the years 2005 and 2015, 102 school-age children were struck and killed in school-transportation-related crashes.

Sixty-four percent of those fatalities were caused by school buses or vehicles functioning as school buses, and the other 36 percent were caused by vehicles of other body types.

Centre County school districts respond

State College Area School District, which had already implemented dashboard cameras in all of its school buses, recorded 77 “stop-arm violations” — instances where cars illegally passed school buses loading or unloading schoolchildren — last school year. As of October, the district had already recorded 27 violations.

So what are local school districts doing to try to curb this problem?

“We have cameras on buses, we want to update those cameras to get ... newer technology,” said Ken Bean, the transportation and fiscal affairs director for Bellefonte Area School District. “We’re looking at the cost of putting the cameras on those bus arms. We continuously monitor school bus stops throughout the year.”

The BASD school board already put its support behind state Senate Bill 1098, which calls for placing cameras on the “stop” arms of school buses to record any violations that occur when the signal arm is deployed and the red lights flash. SB 1098 passed Oct. 24. One week later, a Tyrone Elementary student was fatally struck by a passing car while waiting for the school bus in Franklin Township, Huntingdon County.

“With all the recent tragedies in the news resulting in injuries to children related to school buses (motorist not obeying traffic safety laws) or school bus stops, we wanted to ensure you that our transportation providers are aware of these recent events and are continually stressing the importance of safety with all of their drivers,” BASD Superintendent Michelle Saylor said in a Nov. 1 statement.

Though BASD does not have any data on stop-arm violations involving district buses, Bean said violations are happening.

“I do get feedback from (school bus) drivers that different cars go by them when they have their stop arms up,” he said. “It’s happening too much ... that’s one of the reasons we want to get those (stop-arm) cameras.”

BASD applied for state funding to install stop-arm cameras on all its buses, but it won’t be notified if it received the grant until the spring, Bean said.

Bus safety education important, districts say

At the Penns Valley Area School District, elementary school principals made sure to educate students about bus safety.

“When the child was killed at the bus stop (in Huntingdon County), the following Monday at the schools ... we had a program that was designated to review how to safely get to the bus stop,” said Kurt Nyquist, the principal of Centre Hall and Miles Township elementary schools. They also discussed getting on and off the bus and how to stand a safe distance away from the road while waiting for the bus, he said.

Penns Valley Area School District typically does a review of bus safety procedures every year, bringing in contractors who use real school buses to demonstrate how to safely interact with buses and travel to and from the bus stop. This year, because of the tragedy, it did a second safety demonstration.

The district also made parents aware of the tragedy and the necessity for safe bus procedures, Nyquist said.

Each bus in the Penns Valley school district has four cameras on it to monitor the inside of the bus for fights or other bad behavior. One of the cameras aimed at the inside of the bus also has a view of outside the bus, said Nyquist.

The safety committee at Penns Valley met in the spring, and “we’re talking about a lot of different things,” he said, including putting stop-arm cameras on buses.

In the State College area, SCASD started by trying to get the word out about how widespread stop-arm violations are in the district. The school district has had cameras on its buses and stop-arm cameras since 2016.

Since late October, SCASD school bus cameras have recorded 30 more stop-arm violations, bringing the total number for the school year up to 57.

Last month, Ferguson Township Police Chief Chris Albright told the CDT his department regularly stations officers near the bus stop at Blue Course Drive near College Avenue, because it’s such a high-trafficked, high-violation area. The bus stop near where Plaza Drive connects to Westerly Parkway also has a high number of stop-arm violations, according to the district’s transportation director Van Swauger.

SCASD Communications Director Chris Rosenblum said there have been instances — one of which occurred in the last few days — where the district’s department of transportation needed to move a bus stop because parents or bus drivers determined it unsafe. In the latest change, a bus stop was moved so that a child did not have to cross the street to board the bus.

The district’s transportation director is also considering holding assemblies for elementary school students — in addition to kindergarten camp presentations on bus safety — addressing bus safety next year. “Kind of as a reminder, a safety reminder,” said Rosenblum.

When it comes to SB 1098, Rosenblum said the district appreciates the heightened awareness the state has brought to stop-arm violations. But the cost associated with putting cameras on buses is high. For installing a five-camera system on 50 district buses, he said, the district paid $132,000.

“I think it’s going to be important for the state to offer some kind of grants or funding (for installing stop-arm cameras),” he said.

Rosenblum also said it’s important to note there’s only so much the school district can do when it comes to bus safety.

“I think really the responsibility relies on motorists to stop ... there’s no ambiguity to it,” he said. “If they follow the law ... most, if not all, bus stops will be safe.”

This story was originally published November 30, 2018 at 4:17 PM.