Special Report
A Pre-Trip Inspection a Day Keeps the Lawyers Away
WRITTEN BY CLAUDIA NEWTON |
CLAUDIA@STNONLINE.COM I
ndustry experts share how collaborating and following best practices creates a synergy between the drivers and mechanics for increased efficiency. Sometimes the last thing a school bus driver who is running late wants to do is to stop and conduct a pre-trip inspection. Sometimes the last thing a mechanic or technician is considering is properly filing a work order for a driver-requested repair they just completed. However, those could well be the very first things an attorney checks if a school bus from that operation gets into a crash. Communication and consistency creates the desired synergy
between drivers and mechanics, leading to a school bus operation that is not only more efficient, but safer as well. School bus operations ideally should have a full system that
utilizes paper trails to keep track of repairs that are performed, and those needing to be performed, the National School Transporta- tion Specifications and Procedures manual advises. Joe Scesny is the retired lead school bus inspector for the New
York State Department of Education, a founder of the NAPT America’s Best Technician and Inspector competitions, and a current school bus safety instructor and consultant.
Schools for 25 years and currently owns the consulting firm, School Bus Training Company. He said that when he was the Minneapolis fleet manager, he
required his drivers to go farther than the pre-trip check and complete work orders for needed repairs. “It is possible for maintenance to pull [its] information from the
pre-trip forms but it’s not my preference at all, because they don’t really consider it real reliable—[drivers] don’t go into detail with that in most cases,” he shared. Over the years, both Scesny and Coughlin have presented many training sessions and workshops at the STN EXPO. At the 25th annual Conference last month, they jointly presented the session “Te Relationship of the Preventive Maintenance Inspection & the Driver Pre-Trip Inspection.” “Everything has to have a record,” Coughlin stressed during that
July 16 session. Work orders “become legal documents” that can be used by lawyers and in court. “Don’t just treat it as a piece of paper, treat it as a legal document, because you may have to take it to court,” he reiterated. Driver pre- and post-trip checks, mechanic repairs and preventive mainte- nance inspections, and especially the paperwork that accompanies it all, “is serious stuff—make sure everyone takes it seriously.” Driver thoroughness is a training issue, he said, and “if [manag-
ers] never enforce it, it sometimes gets pretty lax.” Te National Congress on School Transportation advises in its specifications and procedures manual that every preventive mainte- nance program should include “immediate attention to all reported defects.” However, a desire to avoid inconvenience sometimes leads to safety hazards going unreported or overlooked. Investigative reporting has uncovered evidence of drivers doing the “hop and go” without thoroughly checking the bus, as a May news report revealed was happening at Oklahoma City Public Schools. It should only take about eight minutes to perform a proper
A technician at Cobb County School District in Georgia gets a school bus ready for the upcoming school year.
One acceptable option is for drivers to write down a basic problem, but then describe it to the mechanic in more detail, Scesney said. On the flipside, drivers only verbally delivering reports, or mechanics only asking for verbal reports, is a recipe for trouble, since the lack of paper trail can make an operation look bad in this day and age. Worse still, it could result in legal liability or hefty fines, added Denny Coughlin, who was fleet manager for Minneapolis Public
16 School Transportation News • AUGUST 2018
pre-trip inspection, Scesny explained, or a bit longer depending on the age and ability of the driver. He encouraged listeners to use a YouTube video, accessible at
stnonline.com/go/xx, that he made of himself performing such a pre-trip inspection. Scesny added that mechanics should take responsibility, too.
If a mechanic notices a number of things a driver listed as wrong with their bus, they should question it, he said—since it is highly unlikely that all of those problems popped up out of nowhere. More likely, they had been persisting for some time, but had not been adequately reported.
Both Scesny and Coughlin explained that drivers highly prefer
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