sister’s school bus. The driver was unable to see her. Smart technology will only protect students who are
crossing the street, if they cross when the bus is nearby. But expert witness and safety consultant Ned Einstein told School Transportation News that many districts en- courage students to arrive at the bus stop before the bus and leave after it departs. Einstein, a member of STN’s editorial advisory board, said districts likely do this to avoid liability, but he added that he thinks such policies have resulted in many deaths. Fischer, who successfully petitioned President Nixon
to recognize the first National School Bus Safety Week in the early 1970s, scoffed at new technological solutions. He stressed that stricter policies for bus drivers are the only way to truly protect students. He said he thinks that other states should follow the
lead of California, where he was a school district trans- portation director, in requiring drivers to walk on and off the bus with younger students. He noted that more than half of children killed during the 2016-2017 school year were 6 or 7 years old. “Would you let 6-year-olds cross a roadway by themselves?” he asked.
Fischer said he also thinks that buses should be re-
quired to drop students off on the same side of the road as their home, so they don’t need to cross the street. “Doing those two things would solve 1,000 percent of
the problems,” Fischer said. “Everybody wants cameras, because they can make money on them.” But he thinks this only means they will have images of “kids flying through the air” after being hit. Agate said he wants to reframe the whole understand-
ing of unloading and loading, using new technology to change the area around the bus from a “danger zone” to a “safety zone.” “We’re telling kids to stay out of the danger zone for
three feet around the bus,” he noted. “But how about if you have a system where the driver is told when it is safe for you to move that bus, and the driver knows every- thing that’s around the bus. Then we’re creating not a danger zone, but a safety zone around the bus. This technology can help us keep the students safe, not just avoiding near misses, but trying to take it down to zero incidences … so there’s never the tragedy of a child hit on your watch.” ●
48 School Transportation News • MAY 2019
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