HEADLINES
New Mexico Incident Uncovers Additional Training Need for Students in Emergency Situations
One of Rhonda Carlsen’s daughters first noticed something was
wrong with her school bus as it rounded a corner onto her street on Feb. 13. Te bus slowed but kept rolling past the morning stop. Carlsen’s daughter started to run alongside the bus and yelled
back to her mom, “Something is wrong with our bus driver!” “I started running after the bus and was banging and screaming
for someone to open the door and to call 911,” Carlsen recalled. Te bus driver, an employee for one of the 16 contractors who
serve Albuquerque Public School students, was suffering a sei- zure and was essentially non-responsive. “A student stood up (inside the bus), and I pointed to where
he could open the door,” said Carlsen, whose husband is a local firefighter. “He did, and I was able to get inside and stop the bus by putting my foot on the brake and turning off the ignition.” Te incident uncovered an issue Roger Garcia had never en-
countered in his 40 years in student transportation. As a result, the transportation specialist and the school district’s co-interim director of transportation began working with Carlsen to devel- op emergency procedures for students to stop the bus in case their driver becomes incapacitated.
❝
radio and pleaded for help, and dispatch coached her on where to find the parking brake button on the dash, Garcia added. “If I had not been there,
the students on that bus would not have known what to do,” said Carlsen. “So we are going to teach them. We think this can never happen again, but it could be a car accident where the bus driver can be incapacitated or have a heart attack.” Garcia took photos showing the location of parking brake
Local mother Rhonda Carlsen coached a student to open the school bus loading doors after the driver suffered a seizure behind the wheel and then boarded the moving bus and brought it to a safe stop. The incident resulted in Albuquerque Public Schools developing new emergency training for students.
buttons, switches to open the air-operated loading doors, the ignition and other key areas around the bus to create a training pamphlet for all student riders. He also created a Power Point
Tere were many elements that helped this situation turn out the
way it did, thank God. I’m even more thankful that (Albuquerque) is taking this seriously. ❞ — Rhonda Carlsen
“We provide training to all of our kids on how to evacuate a
bus in case of an emergency, but this had never come up,” added Garcia, who started his career as a bus driver and mechanic. “We had the best-case scenario out of the worst situation.” Garcia lauded Carlsen for her heroic actions. “She put her own
safety at risk. Tere was a possibility she might have tripped and been run over by the bus,” he said. Not only was Carlsen present to literally spring into action, but
the bus wasn’t rolling very fast in the residential area. It also was equipped with a manual door, which Garcia said made it a lot easier for the student on board to opened it versus an air door. Tis type has switches or an emergency release button that can be hard to find without prior knowledge. But, even once Carlsen had boarded the bus and depressed
her foot on the brake pedal, she was not yet out of the woods. She took her foot off the pedal and the bus with 40 students on board once again began to roll, as will most large buses with neu- tral and drive transmission modes. Carlsen got on the two-way
28 School Transportation News Magazine May 2012
presentation for all of the district’s contractor companies so their drivers could be trained to instruct their individual passengers. He said the main focus is helping young elementary students learn how to stop the bus in an emergency. Te goal was to teach all students the new procedures by the end of the school year. Meanwhile, the program has caught the attention of other stu- dent transporters across the state, and there is a possibility the program will be shared at the state conference this fall. As for the driver, Garcia said medical tests at this writing had
yet to uncover the cause of the seizure. Doctors had indicated it might have occurred due to low blood pressure, despite the driver having no history of diabetes. Garcia added that the driver had also passed his most recent physical. “Tere were many elements that helped this situation turn out
the way it did, thank God,” Carlsen said. “Every student on that bus is OK (40 plus elementary students) and the driver is doing well, too! “I’m even more thankful that (Albuquerque) is taking this seriously.” ■
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