Re: School Bus Driver Faces 30 Counts of Child Abuse for Slamming on Brakes

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.)
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Rhino