same area to any of the district’s six high schools, shared Director of Transportation Bert Herzog. “While a school bus is always the best option, it’s not
the only option,” Herzog said. “By using the smaller ve- hicles, we can use non-CDL drivers to provide excellent customer service to a population of students that need our services.”
Considering Safety While the practicalities offered by vans can be attrac-
tive, some in the industry are voicing concerns about safety and liability. “They are far less safe than a yellow school bus,” said Charles Gauthier, a former National Highway Traffic Safety Administration official who headed the agen- cy’s school bus program as well as the office of defects investigation before serving as executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Trans- portation from 1995-2006. “But you see more and more of these every day, which means more and more chil- dren are riding in a little vehicle as opposed to a large, heavy school bus.”
Gauthier said he feels the use of smaller vehicles runs
counter to the spirit, if not the letter, of federal guide- lines prohibiting the use of “non-conforming“ vans from being used for home-to-school transportation. In the 1970s, while enacting legislation that led to the formation of school bus Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards, Congress included a prohibition on the sale of new vans with a capacity of 10 passengers or more for use in student transportation. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration cautions that 15-passenger vans, the specific vehicles Congress targeted, are prone to rollovers. While there have been some changes in interpreta-
tions of the law over the years (exactly what constitutes a non-comforming van, for example), the legislation doesn’t address smaller passenger vehicles. “A lot of these little vehicles that are around today
didn’t exist when all the legislation was put together by Congress,” Gauthier observed. The result is that while they’re technically legal, in
Gauthier’s view they don’t meet the original intent of the law. He cites concerns ranging from less training for
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