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pressed by the training, with some calling it “the same write-up with different wall- paper.” Tose with similar sentiments had one main thing in common: they had taken the School Bus Watch training and did not see much of a difference between the two. “It was pretty much the same as School
Bus Watch outside of the few videos that were incorporated with the presentation,” said Karen Boyd of Certified Transporta- tion of San Diego County. Te program has been offered at other
conferences leading up to the STN EXPO, including in Idaho, where Peggy Risenmay of Jefferson County School District No. 251 received the training. Risenmay is now a trainer for First Observer, along with about 25 others from her state. “Tey have made significant improve-
ments to the old system. As a dispatcher for our school district, I am constantly responding to drivers with concerns over the radio. Tis fine-tunes my responses to the drivers and makes me really listen to their concerns,” said Risenmay.
Robert Hertan, a retired transit police
chief and a subject matter expert was on hand to perform the training both in Ida- ho and at the EXPO. “I would hope the First Observer Pro-
gram training would result in pre-attack observing, assessing and reporting that prevents such an occurrence,” said Her- tan, who works for Total Security Ser- vices International, Inc. With all the information that was
covered in the course, some attendees, such as Del Norte County Unified School District Director of Transportation Pat Jensen, said they would have liked more time with the trainers. “I think they have a wealth of informa-
tion to share and there just wasn’t enough time,” said Jensen, who plans on training all of her drivers and anyone else in the community who might be interested. For HMS’ Hall, the endeavor’s main fo-
cus is to teach transportation profession- als to “observe, assess and report criminal or suspicious activity.”
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“As they are the ‘eyes and ears’ on the
roadways, it is our intent to provide the mechanics that will help to further edu- cate them on what does not look normal,” he added. “We believe that they know when something looks suspicious; our goal is to expand on this in an effort to make our highways safer.” No matter the format of the information,
the message to be aware of your environ- ment will be relayed by a number of trans- portation directors across the country. “I plan to keep this topic current in the
minds of our staff,” said Fairport, N.Y., Central School District’s Peter Lawrence. “As William Purkey has said, we need to have ‘eagle eyes’ and ‘Dumbo ears’ to be aware of what is going on around us. Tis training program is very important for all school transportation professionals to take and retake this class regularly. Hope- fully, we will never need to respond to a terrorist act, but it is nice to know that our staff is trained regularly on how to report and respond to these types of events.” n
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