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‘Making Kids Safer’ With
School Bus Safety Company What is Safety? Student transportation professionals live and breathe
safety in order to successfully transport 25 million U.S. schoolchildren to school and return them home every day. But how many can actually define what “safety” is? Jeff Cassell, president of the School Bus Safety Com-
pany, defines safety as “freedom from risk.” Risk, then, is “the possibility of injury or damage to property.” About 1 percent of risk comes from unsafe conditions like faulty steering or faulty bus brakes. However, he stressed that 99 percent of road accidents come from “conscious and deliberate unsafe behaviors by drivers.” Cassell has a long history of being concerned with
such topics. He was the vice president of corporate risk management for school bus contractor Laidlaw, leading operational and safety programs for the drivers of more than 38,000 school buses that transported over 2 million children to and from school every day. Under his guid- ance, Laidlaw reduced its accident rate by more than 72 percent and its cost of losses by more than $40 million a year.
After a 21-year career at Laidlaw, Cassell considered
retiring but then asked himself the question, “How can I make a difference in the school bus industry and save kids’ lives?” He created the School Bus Safety Company (SBSC), whose trainings are now used by seven out of
the 10 largest school bus contractors in North America as well as by about 3,000 school districts in the U.S.
Powerful, Impactful Techniques “Your greatest asset is the person in the [driver’s]
seat,” Cassell stressed, regarding student transportation operations. Knowing that many school districts cannot afford expensive training programs and that they often create their own based on state requirements, Cassell brought together a team of performance improvement experts with specialties like fleet operations and safety, in- dustrial psychology, instructional design and media production. They combined common sense, logic and experience
to create affordable, actionable training. The courses are built around a safety management system, in which one identifies the risks, analyzes them, and takes actions to mitigate them. The resulting SBSC courses, Cassell said, far exceed
any state requirements and provide practical, compre- hensive, essential training for school bus drivers. The practical training gives school bus drivers an immediate way to implement safety strategies in their daily jobs, Cassell reiterated.
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