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ment, a multi-vehicle crash and an armed trespasser onboard. Te firefighters also set a controlled fire and used theater smoke


on four buses, then hid dummies so that drivers would have to find the trapped “children.” Galaude said they used to rely on video footage to teach proper


procedures yet realized drivers were not getting the full effect of a real emergency situation. “We put you in a bus full of smoke so you can see, if the bus is


on fire, what you actually experience and what you go through. We put you on a bus with a person you know nothing about, who could have a real gun, compared to us doing the role-playing,” he continued. “When you get behind the wheel of that bus with students on it,


£ The new Behind-the-Wheel Training Program from the Pupil Transportation Safety Institute offers more teaching tools for driver trainers. Faye Stevens, pictured above, developed the five-day Train the Trainer Academy.


Last summer the district made headlines for partnering with Houston firefighters to prepare 1,000 bus drivers for a train derail-


you could actually educate those students on what to do if anything happens, instead of sitting in a room with a video thinking that it would never happen to you.” Mark Swackhamer, Houston’s senior manager of fleet operations, said the bus drivers also received training on operating the silent alarms that work with the GPS systems on every bus in their fleet. Annual driver training also covers topics on employee conduct outside of the bus, including sexual harassment, conflict resolution and employee-to-employee bullying. “We try not to repeat the same training, though some topics are


typically repeated out of necessity, such as first aid and anti-ter- rorism. Even though we haven’t had any instances, you train like it could happen tomorrow,” Swackhamer stressed.


50 School Transportation News May 2014


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