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hen an opponent claimed he had a strategy to defeat Mike Tyson, the most feared boxer in generations, he famously replied, “Everybody has plans until they get punched in the face.” Instead, they freeze in fear. Nothing punches a transportation department in the face hard- er than a school bus crash or other emergency involving injuries or


deaths. It’s what happens after the punch that matters most. Tracie Franco, the transportation director for Leander (Texas) Independent School


District, learned that lesson firsthand Aug. 13—the first day of this school year—when a bus carrying 46 students left a rural road and overturned. “At first, I thought, this can’t be as bad as they’re saying. I was kind of in denial at the moment, until I got there. My heart just stopped,” said Franco, who has 18 years of school transportation experience. “It was very emotional.” While she was momentarily stunned, Franco quickly shook off the punch. She and


colleagues across the district’s different departments had trained for such a situation and assumed their specific responsibilities at the crash scene and elsewhere. “Once you get there, you start dealing with the situation at hand. Then you put the


emotion aside and you go into action mode. What do I need to do to help these kids? What do I have to do to help the parents?” Franco recalled. Ironically, emergency management professionals were still in the area assisting in


recovery for the Guadalupe River flooding disaster a month earlier, which killed 135 people. Their field outpost served as a temporary focal point to comfort Leander ISD students and reunite them with families. Kemberly Edwards related to what Franco went through. She was the Mesquite Inde-


pendent School District’s director of counseling Oct. 3, 2018, when she and the assistant superintendent of administrative services received calls almost simultaneously with news about a serious bus crash. “A counselor called me from that school and said, ‘I need you. This is bad,’” Edwards recalled. A bus was carrying 42 children and veered across the road in the east Dallas sub- urb, after the driver over-corrected and struck a pole. The bus burst into flames, and 12-year-old Jazmine Alfaro was trapped inside and died. Three other students and the bus driver were injured. Three police officers were treated for smoke inhalation in their unsuccessful attempt to rescue Alfaro. With her boss already headed to the crash site, Edwards contacted the district’s high school intervention counselors and put them in charge of notifying other counselors to go to the middle school that the bus had left a short time earlier. Arriving before the children, the counselors got the children off the bus, separating those with minor physi- cal injuries who needed attention from nurses. “Our job ranged from helping kids calm down and giving them comfort to reuniting them with concerned parents who had come to the school to dealing with staff mem- bers who were also upset,” Edwards recalled. “At that point, everybody knew we’d lost a student. We dealt with the immediate crisis.” David Rhodes, editor-in-chief for Fire & Rescue Media and a 37-year fire service


Aftermath of the Leander ISD school bus crash, which took place on the first day of the 2025-2026 school year.


veteran, said the best preparation for a transportation emergency begins long before the first 911 call. Clear, accurate communication is an essential step in effective emergency responses and that requires trust, they emphasize. “Whether it’s just a business transaction or emergency management, nothing is faster than trust. If you have those trust relationships—if you know someone by their first name or you’ve been around them enough to recognize them—at a minimum, it just seems like an incident flows,” said Rhodes, whose service included 17 years as an Atlanta Fire Department battalion chief. “If you don’t know them, you don’t have time under that level of stress to develop that relationship. Somebody’s tapping on your ve-


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