DRIVING THE INDUSTRY SINCE 1991
DOES YOUR OPERATION PROVIDE SPECIFIC, TAILORED EVACUATION TRAINING FOR STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES?
24%
Not Applicable Yes
No 69% 7%
Of 168 responses to STN special needs survey
only be accomplished if transporta- tion personnel are included when the IEP is developed. “Tey can’t plan it without them in my opinion,” said Charley Kenning- ton, director of Innovative Trans- portation Solutions in Houston. He will teach an emergency evacuation training class March 8 at the TSD Conference in Frisco, Texas. “Transportation needs to be a
part of the IEP team for them to decide how they are going to do an emergency evacuation from a special needs bus. Typically teachers and other staff may not know what equipment is even available on the bus, so they need to communicate.” Steve Satterly, director of safety
£ Policies may call for leaving students in their
wheelchairs during emergency bus evacuations, but experts agree that carrying them out to save their lives is also OK.
said. “If you have two minutes to empty a bus, there is no way ma- neuvering that chair is going to be quicker and safer for the student, or for the person removing them, than removing them from the wheelchair and dragging them to safety. I’m not saying that the more complex students should be taken out of the wheelchair willy-nilly, but in an emergency, it is going to be far safer and quicker to just drag that student out.” Te experts also agreed that
emergency contingencies for special needs students should be covered in the student’s Individual Education Plan (IEP). Tat’s why, they said, the IEPs should include an Individual Transportation Plan (ITP). Tat can
and transportation for the Commu- nity School Corporation of Southern Hancock County in Palestine, Ind., has not only put the ITP in the IEP, but this year, for the first time, he included special needs students in the district’s rear-door evacuation drills. “Each child with special needs
must have a personalized safety plan as part of their IEP,” said Satterly. “I decided that needed to include the transportation safety plans.” Satterly added that the drills
include the bus driver and an aide “unfastening the students from their wheelchairs, placing them on a blan- ket and carrying them to the back of the bus.” He sought instruction from his local fire department on the prop-
er method for lowering the students to the ground. “Te EMS chief told us about
flame-retardant rescue blankets with handles,” he said. “We found them online and are in the process of or- dering them so we can have them on each of our special needs buses.” Satterly included the special needs students in the drill to make sure they were comfortable with the process. “Te way you practice is the way
you play,” Satterly said. “We want them to practice so they are not overwhelmed. When it comes to evacuations, you’ve got to go though the evacuation process. As uncom- fortable as it made my drivers, they wanted to learn. Parents were kept abreast of all the things we were doing, so when it happened it wasn’t traumatic for anybody. Te kids were joking and laughing throughout the whole process.” Kennington noted that what he
teaches student transporters when it comes to emergency evacuation situations is that they really need to be taking students out of the chairs anyway. “We teach how to lift them, and
get them on the floor so you can drag them,” he said. “In fact, when we do the training, I say at the outset that before you put them on the bus, you better know how to get them off. If you haven’t done that, you haven’t done justice to the child.”
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