INDUSTRY CONNECTIONS


Moving on to Green-er Pastures Retired California state director reminisces on 38-year career By Ryan Gray


for the position. The rest is, as they say, history. “I truly feel this way, that it really is such a great industry,”


he told School Transportation News last month, less than three weeks from his own official retirement date of Dec. 30. “I’m just amazed at the jobs school bus drivers do every single day. It’s just amazing the stresses and the stain they’re under. I don’t think they get nearly the credit they certainly deserve.” Over time, Green lived through several watershed moments


affecting the evolution of school transportation, including the infamous 1973 Chowchilla school bus hostage incident. Armed gunmen hijacked a school bus with 20 students and the driver onboard, drove it to a remote location and buried the vehicle in a gravel pit. Te driver and several of the students managed to dig their way out, and the three kidnappers were apprehended and sentenced to life in prison. At the time, Green worked for a local Sheriff’s Department,


John Green announced his retirement in early


December after nearly 20 years at the California De- partment of Education (CDE), the last 13 years as supervisor of the Office of School Transportation. Green began his career in 1971 as a school bus driver


for now-defunct contractor Servicar. By 1975, Congress passed the “Education for All Handicapped Children Act,” the precursor to IDEA, and the Santa Clara County Board of Education hired Green to work in the newly- created special education transportation department. But he also felt a calling to work in law enforcement, so


Green soon found himself driving a bus during the day, tak- ing criminal justice courses in between routes and working the overnight swing-shift for the local Sheriff’s Department. “It was crazy. I would be the first one to jump all over


somebody who was trying to do that,” he said. “But at the time it didn’t seem outrageous at all. It was some- thing I loved to do, but I didn’t get a lot of sleep.” With yellow coursing through his veins, Green also


became a state school bus driver instructor in Octo- ber of 1976. By May of 1979 he was selected as one of 10 state school bus coordinators with the California Highway Patrol in San Jose and remained there until 1991, when he was administratively transferred to CHP headquarters in Sacramento as program manag- er of the state’s commercial vehicle section. His work didn’t go unnoticed. Three years later, Ron Kinney, at the time California’s state director of pupil transpor- tation, brought Green onboard at CDE as a school bus driver training specialist. When Kinney announced his retirement from CDE in the fall of 1997, Green applied


16 School Transportation News Magazine January 2011


and his beat included the area where the kidnappers dumped two vans used to commandeer the bus. Te incident led to a new state education code that required security training for school bus drivers long before the 9/11 attacks. Green said another key moment in his career and that of


the entire industry occurred in May of 1976 when a school bus charter trip crash in Martinez, Calif., killed 27 teenagers and their adult music teacher. The incident involved a 26-year-old school bus that was carrying 53 people from Yuba City west of Sacramento to a high school band competition in Orinda, located east of San Francisco. The bus had just crossed the Martinez-Benecia bridge that spans the San Francisco Bay when the driver decided to pull into a rest stop. The driver lost control and the bus left the off-ramp, flipping the vehicle onto its roof. The roof flattened and the victims were crushed in their seats by the impact. Nearly a year later NHTSA published the first FMVSS for school


bus crash protection. Green recalled that the crash was “eerily similar” to the one involving a Huntsville, Ala., school bus in the fall of 2006. And then, as now, a debate raged over seat belts. But Green said the CHP later found that the fatality rate could have been higher if the passengers were buckled up. While Green said he was focused on “taking a break” and per-


haps some additional college courses, he fondly looked back at his 38-year career in pupil transportation. “I’m just so proud to be associated with this industry in any way.


If I in any way have contributed to it being successful, it makes me feel very good about spending those years in this industry,” Green said. “I don’t think there’s a lot of people who can say that about the work that they do. My career was very well spent.” Anna Borges, a 12-year veteran of the Office of School Transportation, was named Green’s successor on Dec. 15. ■


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