National Bus Sales, Inc.

Super School Buses Appear in SE China

2011-03-31T08:46:00.008-05:00

The local government of Lecong Town, in Guangdong Province, southern China has purchased six "super school buses" that were manufactured in line with American standards; they cost 2,400,000 yuan ($365,760) in total, the Southern Metropolis Daily reports.

The school bus manufacturer in central China say the six buses were made strictly in accordance with the standards of American-made school buses, both in appearance and performance.

The school bus has a classic appearance. It is painted yellow and the bus body is mounted on a cowled medium-duty truck chassis and contains a stop signal arm that uses flashing red lights. The bus has a "long nose" which protrudes forward 1.5 meters, and is designed to absorb the force in a crash so as to provide protection in a head-on collision.

The bus contains 50 seats-47 students' seats, two guardians' and one driver's seat. All seats are equipped with seat belts. The windows are of the closed push-pull design to stop students opening the windows during the trip. In addition to the entry door, all school buses have two emergency exits located in the roof, which can be opened by the use of quick-release latches, the report says.

Selecting and Purchasing a Church Bus

2011-03-21T08:36:00.000-05:00

So, you have had the good fortune of being put in charge of selecting and purchasing a new bus for your church. Now what?

You need to acquire a vehicle that is properly equipped to perform as intended for your particular organization. Clearly defining the church's objectives is a very important initial step in the bus purchasing process. If you get the right size bus, with the right engine, the right alternator, from the right dealer, then many of the rest of the issues, such as accessories, will just be a matter of preference.

First, do not confuse purchasing a new bus with purchasing a car. There are many considerations to weigh when buying a new car, but many of them are subjective. Purchasing a new bus is more like purchasing a piece of capital equipment for a business. Success depends on acquiring a vehicle that is properly equipped to perform as intended for your particular organization. Clearly defining the church's objectives is a very important initial step.

First, does your church have a school? Will the bus transport the students who attend that school to various school-related activities? If so, you must purchase a bus that is certified to comply with the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) set out by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) for school buses, or MFSABs. Otherwise, you will be providing transportation to your students in violation of federal law. Please note that this does not apply to transporting school-age children for church-related activities. The age of the passenger is not the issue. The issue is whether the passengers are being transported to and from school, or for school-related activities. Churches are not required to transport children in school buses for church-related activities.

The next step I recommend is identifying a dealer that is equipped to guide you through the process and show you the type of buses that you wish to purchase. Preferably, you should choose a dealer that has the product support capability to assist you with your service or maintenance needs after you take ownership. A bus isn't a new book or a pair of pants that you can return if you don't like it. Our best customers are those who make the effort to become educated buyers. That means visiting dealers to look at buses and considering all of the options.

The next important step is to determine your passenger capacity requirements. It is very difficult to assist someone who doesn't know how many people they need to transport. It's a little like trying to fit an article of clothing for someone who can't tell you their size. Consider the following important points.

A bus that will accommodate more than 15 passengers, including the driver, requires a commercial driver's license (CDL). There are great alternatives to stock 15-passenger vans that provide full standing entry and interior headroom that do not require a CDL. These small buses are essentially mini mini-buses. Their dual rear wheel axles give them a wider stance for greater stability and safety than stock vans, and their spacious interiors and easy access make it actually possible to get 15 people in one without stacking them.

The next size threshold is 24 passengers, which is what most churches purchase. These small buses are most often built on Ford Econoline chassis, which gives them the feel and appearance of a very large van. They are affordable, relatively easy to drive, easy to maneuver in town, and practical to service.

The next size bus will most often be built on a Chevrolet 5500 or International 3200 chassis and will accommodate up to as many as 36 to 40 passengers. These buses often have price tags that exceed $100,000, offer fewer outlets for service and repair, and require greater skill to drive. That is not to suggest that these buses are not a good choice for your church, but it is important to consider the eligibility of drivers for a bus of that size and determine where you will take it for chassis-related warranty work.

Now that we know what size bus will meet your needs, equipping it correctly is important.

Engine Selection
The small buses built on Ford or Chevrolet chassis are available with either gasoline or diesel engines. Historically, diesel has proved to be more reliable in heavy-duty applications, but most churches do not accumulate high mileage on their buses and, consequently, do not realize the benefits that diesel engines provide. For buses below 24 passengers, we recommend a gasoline-powered engine for greater reliability and serviceability. The larger buses with capacities over 24 are often only available with diesel engines, although Chevrolet does offer an 8.1 liter gasoline engine in its 5500 model.

Climate Control
Getting the right air conditioning system in some parts of the United States is critical, just as it is to get adequate heating capacity in the cooler climates. Purchasing from a dealer in your region of the country is important because one size certainly does not fit all. The next size air conditioning system is not that expensive relative to the overall price of the bus; however, it's not an upgrade that can be easily made once the bus is built, so pay attention to this detail.

Alternator
A bus won't start if the batteries are dead, and that's what the batteries will be if you do not have the right alternator. This is a very important issue on small buses that accommodate 24 passengers or less. Ford's standard 135 amp alternator is adequate for many applications, as it carries Ford's 3 year/36,000 mile warranty and is relatively inexpensive to replace. But, if your usage is mostly local, or if you use your bus as a parking lot shuttle on Sundays, or if you equip your new bus with a wheelchair lift, then you should upgrade the alternator. All of these types of uses suggest low alternator output, many times with the air conditioning system on high. This can discharge the batteries quickly.

The tradeoff of upgrading the alternator is that it will add about $1,000 to the cost of the vehicle and make replacement a bigger issue than it is with a standard alternator. The biggest disadvantage of a high-capacity aftermarket alternator is replacing it while on a long-distance trip.

This is such an important matter that we give our customers a form at the time of purchase that explains the pros and cons of their alternator choice, and we ask them to sign it to acknowledge that they understand the issue.

If you get the right size bus, with the right engine, the right alternator, from the right dealer, then many of the rest of the issues will be a matter of preference, such as:

* Seat style - High back or mid back

* Upholstery level

* Recliners

* Side sliders

* Fabric covered interior or hard surface that is easier to maintain

* Overhead storage

* TVS & DVD players

* Paint stripes and lettering

Finally, please keep in mind that the price of the bus is only one factor in calculating the cost. You may be the person leading the purchasing process, but who is going to be the person that supervises its maintenance? Too many churches do not address this issue in advance, and you can tell this by the condition that their buses are in when they come if for service. Make this issue a priority early on so that your bus will remain in good working condition throughout its useful life.

This article was published in Religious Product News magazine in January 2008.

Finding Fairness for Rural Students

2011-03-08T10:44:00.001-06:00

One day when I was about 10 years old, I was walking down the rural road my family lived on when a bus carrying a visiting high school baseball team from a far away urban school pulled to a stop beside me. The driver opened the door and hollered, “Where’s the local high school?” I told him he had to turn around, go back to the top of the big hill, turn left, and drive another half mile. As the bus pulled away, one of the ballplayers yelled out the window at me, “Hey, Hayseed,” to the derisive roar of his teammates. I remember thinking, “I’m no hayseed, and I’m not the one who’s lost.”

Rural people remain one of the last groups about whom cultural slurs are considered politically acceptable speech. No one is criticized for calling someone a “hayseed,” not to mention hick, hillbilly, bumpkin, redneck, goober, yokel, rube, plowboy, cracker, trailer trash, or woodchuck.

Rural people are easily subjected to these cultural defamations, in part, because they’re too willing to accept them. Even the word “rural” itself is sometimes used in a sleight-of-hand manner by rural people. In a remarkable exercise in cultural relativity, rural has been defined by many as “any place smaller than where I live.” This notion runs through American culture to its core. I once asked a man who lived in a town of fewer than 1,000 residents in a remote area of the Great Plains if he considered himself “rural.” “Oh no,” he quickly protested, “I live here in town, not on a farm.”

But “rural” not only means small and remote in our cultural lexicon. It also means removed from the progressive influences of modern life. The cultural conflict between urban modernity and rural traditionalism is reflected with most ferocity in politics, where simplicity always appeals. Some argue that rural people don’t understand their own self-interest when they vote for conservative candidates (Frank 2004), while others respond that rural “elites” have fostered an anti-urban conservative political rebellion that threatens to take urban progress back to the Dark Ages (Mann 2006), and still others argue that rural voters are quintessentially pragmatic and not ideologically anything (Boyles 2007). TV political analysts and pundits, with their need to polarize, can’t seem to get enough of this divide, as when CNN commentator and Democratic strategist James Carville expressed the profoundly glib opinion (based on 2010 presidential voting) that Pennsylvania is “Philadelphia and Pittsburgh with Alabama in between.”

Rural Matters

In the midst of this cultural divide, over 9 million students attended a school classified as “rural” by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2007. This doesn’t include another 6 million who attend schools in small towns that most urbanites would definitely find “rural.”

A national statistical profile of the students in these rural districts places them pretty close to the national mean on many variables. But national averages mean very little in a rural context. The variation from state to state and place to place is so large that averages simply mask extremes. Nationally, the poverty rate (as measured by eligibility for Title I funding) for all rural and small town districts is 18.5%, slightly higher than the national average for all districts. But in the 10% of rural and small-town districts with the highest rates of disadvantaged students, over 37% of the students live in poverty (about the same rate as the Bronx). Moreover, 59% of the 1.3 million students in those high-poverty rural districts are children of color — 28% black, 23% Hispanic, and 8% Native American.

If these high-poverty rural and small-town districts were one school district, it would be the largest, poorest, most racially diverse district in the nation. But they are not one district. They are a dispersed group of generally small districts (three-fourths have fewer than 2,000 students) mostly south of a line running roughly from Washington, D.C., through Cincinnati, Kansas City, Denver, and Sacramento.

Rural School Finance

The dispersion of rural students among many small districts, coupled with the wide socioeconomic variation among rural regions, has political implications for the way rural schools are funded. Dispersion and poverty are two of the most virile enemies of political power, and where they coincide, they leave in their wake some of the most meagerly funded schools in America.

Where rural people are a relatively large proportion of a state’s population — as in Alabama, Arkansas, Maine, Mississippi, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Vermont — they might have some political power. But, in many of these states, rural people are disproportionately poor and often divided along racial lines.

So, it’s not surprising that when state legislators sit down to carve up the school funding pie, rural areas are often weakly represented, especially when pitted against themselves along racial or socioeconomic lines. In far too many states, funding systems have been crafted that systematically deprive rural schools, especially those in low-wealth regions, of the fiscal capacity to provide an education that meets contemporary standards. Usually reluctant to complain, rural people have nonetheless often gone to court to seek relief from inadequate and inequitable school funding systems. In early 2011, eight of 13 active constitutional challenges to state school funding systems involve rural plaintiffs. Twenty-seven of 32 earlier cases were brought by rural plaintiffs.

Rural plaintiffs have often prevailed in these cases, and sometimes they’ve made a big difference for all schools in a state. Consider the tiny Lake View School District in the Mississippi River Delta region of Arkansas. Lake View was a K-12 district with fewer than 200 students and a poverty rate approaching 100% when it filed suit in 1992 challenging the constitutionality of Arkansas’ miserly school funding system. Ten years later, this small district’s lonely struggle was rewarded by an Arkansas Supreme Court ruling that the state funding system was both inadequate and inequitable.

In these rural cases, the facts are often compelling. The facts in the Lake View case were stunning. The uncontested testimony by witnesses for the plaintiff revealed a wasteland of education funding disparity and deprivation. By way of summary, the Arkansas Supreme Court described the situation in Lake View: “[The district] has one uncertified mathematics teacher who teaches all high school mathematics courses. He is paid $10,000 a year as a substitute teacher and works a second job as a school bus driver, where he earns $5,000 a year. He has an insufficient number of calculators for his trigonometry class, too few electrical outlets, no compasses and one chalkboard, a computer lacking software and a printer that does not work, an inadequate supply of paper, and a duplicating machine that is overworked” (Lake View v. Huckabee).

Within a few years of this decision, the Arkansas school funding system was dramatically overhauled, with significant increases in funding for operations and facilities and with more emphasis on getting the money to high-needs districts. An annual review of the minimally adequate level of funding the state must provide is conducted, and the state is obligated to fund it.

But in their enthusiasm for reform, the Arkansas General Assembly and Gov. Mike Huckabee cast a loathsome eye on persistent Lake View and other small, rural districts. In the mind of the political elite, these bothersome community schools were both bad and inefficient. So, with the new funding came a statutory mandate that all districts with fewer than 350 students be closed. Fifty-seven, including Lake View, were merged or consolidated with larger districts. Never adequately funded, the Lake View district got the death penalty for speaking the truth to power.

Consolidation

For many rural communities, the primary school funding issue now is whether they can have a school at all. The issue of state-mandated school or school district consolidation is a leading political issue in nearly half the states. It’s been an on-again, off-again issue nationwide since the 1920s, when motorized transport developed to the point that children could be assembled over larger catchment areas than when they walked or rode horses to one-room schoolhouses.

In these earliest days, the push to close rural schools came primarily from professional educators who argued on the grounds of school improvement. Rural schools were unprofessionally run and dominated by localism and backwardness. Bigger schools could offer more professional, more specialized instruction and a richer curriculum. There was no talk of efficiency or saving money. Anyone who opposed school consolidation was provincial, narrow-minded, and anti-progressive.

Although there has been an ebb and flow to the intensity of this process, it’s been relentless. For most of this history, most closures have been voluntary or forced only by local political decisions. But in recent years, four factors seem to trigger the call for statutorily mandated rural school or district closings:

Declining enrollment leading to increasing per pupil cost in rural schools (and, of course, reflected in diminished rural political power);
Fiscal distress and budget cuts in state government;
Disparities in the economic fortunes of the rural versus the urban areas of the state; and
Court decisions like those in the Lake View case, forcing overhaul of school funding systems.

In various combinations, some or all of these factors have led to pressure for state-mandated rural school consolidation in many states.

While there is still lip service given to the idea that consolidation is about school improvement, it is manifest that the primary purpose is cutting spending. Professional educators are no longer at the forefront of the consolidation movement. Now, governors, legislative leaders, and chief state school officers (more policy makers than professional educators) are leading the way.

There are some fundamental political realities about state-mandated consolidation of rural schools. First, the attack is almost always launched against districts, not schools, and the target is wasteful central administration in small districts. It is often promised, and sometimes written into statute, that, at least for some grace period, schools will not be closed. But schools always are closed eventually because there really is not much money to be saved in closing districts alone. The purpose of closing districts is to decommission the political apparatus that protects schools, because closing schools, laying off teachers, and enlarging class size is what might save money. But these expected savings are often illusory because teacher salaries are usually lower in the closed district than in the district that absorbs it, and the salaries must be leveled up as new contracts are negotiated, and because hauling all those kids longer distances to larger schools costs a lot of money.

Second, mandated consolidation is always forced on the politically most vulnerable schools — those that serve low-wealth communities, especially communities of color.

In Arkansas, for example, there were 134 schools operating in districts that were closed and those that absorbed them in 2004. Of those, 47 were closed within two years. Forty-two of those 47 school closings were in the districts absorbed into larger districts. The schools that were closed had 21% higher student poverty rates and served nearly three times higher percentages of black students than the schools allowed to remain open. If you were a black student in an annexed district, there was a 7-in-10 chance of your school being closed. If you were not black, your chances were 3-in-10.

In Maine, a mandatory school district consolidation began with the premise that all districts had to enter into good faith negotiations with other districts in their area and arrive at a consolidation plan that would ensure that the minimum enrollment in each district would be no fewer than 2,500. But as the negotiations proceeded, it became clear that some larger, wealthier districts wanted no part of absorbing lower wealth districts whose teacher salaries in the newly minted district would need to be raised to the level of their own teacher salaries. Exemptions were provided for 38 larger districts that already had the required minimum enrollment, generally high property tax bases, and over half the students in the state. In the end, the kind of consolidation envisioned by the law involves only one-fourth of the state’s students. Another 15% are in 140 rural districts that simply refused to consolidate and are suffering stateaid penalties as a result (loss of half their state aid for administration, and loss of 5% of their aid for facilities and maintenance, special education, and transportation). This resistance is centered in the “Rural Rim,” the small, rural communities between I-95 and the woods of northern Maine, the Down East region along the Atlantic coast east of Bar Harbor, and the far northeast, along the border with the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Quebec.

State Funding Systems

By far, the more conventional strategy to close rural schools is not through state mandates, but fiscal asphyxiation. Over time, a small rural district that’s inadequately funded will defer building maintenance in order to pay teachers, and it will ultimately face a major capital expenditure that requires bonding and forces the local voters to decide whether to keep the school open.

However, generalizing about state school-funding systems is dangerous. While there are some patterns, there truly are 50 unique systems. The funding formulas are largely a negotiated set of tradeoffs between variables designed to favor one group of districts over another, offset by other variables designed to mitigate the damages.

Rural areas generally benefit from provisions in many state-aid formulas that adjust aid based on district enrollment size. Often, these adjustments are limited to “necessarily” small districts, those for whom small size is a function of remote location, sparse population, or difficult terrain, and not a matter of choice. In most cases, the amount of additional aid due to these factors is very small.

There are also many state funding formulas that soften the effect of declining enrollment on per pupil funding allocations, often by using the average enrollment over a number of previous years. This helps many rural districts, as well as some nonrural districts with declining enrollment.

Most state funding systems also make adjustments based on the number of at-risk students, English language learners, and special education students in a district. Since these allocations are usually made based on shares from a fixed appropriation, these measures help rural districts in proportion to the presence of these students in the district, as they should.

Finally, transportation funding is often substantially supported by state aid, sometimes entirely. For rural areas, this is a two-edged sword. Such state aid is a relief to rural taxpayers, without question. But it’s also a subsidy to consolidation, which makes it the least likely of “rural friendly” formula factors to come under attack when state legislatures would rather close rural schools than fund them.

Other aspects of the state school funding system often outweigh these perquisites for small and rural schools. Most damaging are school funding systems that rely too heavily on local property taxes. The local property tax is the bane of most rural schools, especially those in low-wealth regions. Because high-wealth districts have unfettered access to a strong property tax base, they can easily outbid low-wealth rural districts (and urban) in the very competitive market for teachers. Sometimes, states standardize teacher salary schedules in an attempt to level the playing field, and some states even fund teacher salary positions directly. But this attempt at equity is often undermined by a local option to “supplement” the state salary schedule from local property taxes.

Categorical funding is also a problem. In small schools, the total funding available under categorical programs may be too small to efficiently run the required program. Moreover, mandated high-cost services that are inadequately funded can create a catastrophe in a small school system. A single high-needs special education student can bankrupt a small school.

Among the most anti-rural provisions increasingly seen in state school funding systems is using education cost adjustments to account for the undeniable fact that the cost of providing educational services varies across the state. Some states use a simple cost of living indicator, others more sophisticated economic analyses. But no matter the approach used, the common denominator is that these adjustments always seem to merely offset other formula provisions designed to send more aid to districts facing higher levels of poverty. This is simply because the best jobs, the most expensive housing, and the capacity to pay for them are not in places of poverty.

In rural areas, this is a particularly thorny issue because, whether the cost-comparison measure is cost of living, teacher salaries, or salaries of nonteachers with college educations, the challenge of luring a teacher to a small, low-wealth rural community with limited amenities, poor housing, and few college-educated peers, and keeping that teacher there beyond the first beckoning from a better situated district, is simply daunting. So far, no attempt to adjust for local variation in cost has captured the essence of this challenge, and most cost-adjusters just take money away from high-needs schools and send it to wealthier districts.

Federal Role

You would expect federal funding formulas to take a more deliberate look at equitable distribution of funding, especially under Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, the federal program whose explicit purpose is to increase the capacity of local school districts to meet the needs of disadvantaged students. Unfortunately, some of the most egregious school funding inequities for rural schools are buried deep in the Title I formula.

Some Title I funds are distributed using a weighting system to artificially inflate the count of disadvantaged students in a district. The purpose is to send more money to schools with “high concentrations” of poverty. That’s a good idea, but it’s been poorly applied under current law.

That’s because Congress decided that “high concentration” of poverty can mean either high percentages of disadvantaged students or just plain high numbers of disadvantaged students, even if those high numbers do not translate into high percentages. Large suburbs, for example, can pile up large numbers of poor kids, even though they’re a small percentage of the total district enrollment.

This dual meaning of “high concentration” was first used in 2002. Since then, each district’s disadvantaged student count is calculated using both the “percentage weighting” and the “number weighting” systems. The higher of the two counts is the one that goes into the formula to determine that district’s share of the Title I appropriation. Most districts gain weighted student count under one or both of these weighting schemes.

But here’s the rub. Just because a district gets a boost in student count under one or the other of the weighting systems doesn’t mean it gets more money. Why not? Because the total amount available to be distributed is fixed by congressional appropriation, so the formula is really just a way to determine shares of that pool of money. Even if a district gets an increase in student count, it can still lose funding if other districts get a proportionally bigger boost in student count. About 10,700 smaller districts suffered just that because 550 larger districts outmuscled them by number weighting, according to a 2008-09 Congressional Research Service analysis.

With number weighting, money moves from smaller districts — no matter how high their student poverty rate — to larger districts — no matter how low their student poverty rate. Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, New York, and Philadelphia are among the beneficiaries of number weighting, but so are large, low-poverty suburban districts like Fairfax County, Va. (suburban Washington), Gwinnett County, Ga. (suburban Atlanta), and Baltimore County, Md. (suburban Baltimore). High-poverty rural and smalltown districts and even high-poverty small-city districts, like those in Rochester, N.Y.; Laredo, Texas; Flint, Mich.; and Reading, Pa., are all damaged.

How bad is it? Fairfax County, with a 6% poverty rate, gets more Title I money for each disadvantaged student than rural Virginia’s Lee County Public Schools with its 33% poverty rate.

Rural communities are real places that for generations have educated their children and sent them off to earn their living and pay their taxes elsewhere. These communities and the schools that serve them are a lot more complex than those who succumb to rural stereotypes want to acknowledge, let alone understand. But with one-third of U.S. public school students in rural or small-town schools, some of them in the poorest communities in the nation, the needs of these schools can be ignored only by dropping the pretext that the education of every child matters. School funding systems should reflect the real differences among rural school districts, just as they should reflect the differences among all districts. “Rural” is not per se a favored class. But neither is it a category to dismiss as bygone or backward or insignificant, as has too often been the case.

Safety Officials Warn About Toys Snagging on School Buses

2011-03-04T11:31:00.001-06:00

Washington, DC - State school bus safety officials and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) today warned parents that popular "Pokemon," "Furby," "Beanie Babies" and other small toys that can be attached to backpacks or clothing pose a potential safety hazard to children getting off school buses.

Michael Martin of the School Bus Information Council said, "Fortunately there have been no deaths or injuries cause by these toys snagging, so we have an opportunity to forewarn parents and school officials. But since 1991 six children have been killed when clothing, book bags, backpacks or other loose items snagged on a school bus handrail or door component-they were dragged to their deaths or run over when the bus pulled away. At least 22 others have been injured in similar incidents."

"These toys are all the rage with youngsters today and it's only natural that they would want to show them off," Martin said. "There is nothing wrong with the toys themselves, but any toy that dangles off backpacks or clothing is every bit as dangerous as loose drawstrings, straps, and other items that have caused deaths and injuries in a number of situations. It's the old adage about an ounce of prevention-parents need to know about the danger and should remove these toys from their child's clothing and backpacks immediately."

NHTSA Acting Administrator Rosalyn G. Millman said, "The United States has an outstanding pupil transportation safety record because state and federal officials and the school bus industry constantly work together to minimize risks. We always err on the side of caution, giving parents and caregivers information they need to make their child's trip to and from school as safe as humanly possible."

"Over the past decade, the designs of childrens' clothing and other items they carry have changed, causing unnecessary fatalities and injuries when they became entangled. School bus manufacturers initiated recalls to reconfigure handrails and other equipment to prevent problems. But, the most effective way to prevent problems is for parents and caregivers to ensure that children do not wear or carry anything likely to become entangled," she said.

NHTSA first expressed concern in 1993 about the entanglement of clothing in school bus handrails and issued several consumer warnings. The safety agency investigated the handrail designs of all major school bus manufacturers and nine subsequently conducted safety recalls to make the handrails in their buses less prone to snagging incidents.

The manufacturers took these actions even though the safety problem was with the clothing children were wearing, not the handrail designs that had been in use for many incident-free years. As a result of separate investigations by the Consumer Product Safety Commission of problems with clothing snagging on playground equipment and fences, clothing manufacturers developed industry standards for drawstrings on childrens' clothing.

Snagging incidents in school buses have declined, but in 1997 a Maryland girl was dragged after a drawstring snagged, as was a Rhode Island girl in 1998 when her backpack became wedged in the handrail. Fortunately, neither was injured seriously.

Millman and Martin urged school bus fleet operators to make sure that the necessary repairs were made to older buses and keep awareness about this problem high by emphasizing it during school bus driver training.

"Before pulling away from each stop, drivers should look at the closed exit door carefully and then use their outside mirrors to look again to make sure a child is not still attached to the bus," Martin said.

The handrails, also called grab rails, are located inside school buses, sometimes on both sides of the step well. Snagging occurs when something gets wedged between the body of the bus and the lower end of the handrail or in the door itself. School bus manufacturers have designed simple remedies that fill the gap to prevent the likelihood of snagging.

According to Martin, the big yellow school bus is one of the safest forms of transportation in the U.S. and fatal incidents involving school buses are rare events. He credits the industry's stellar safety record to its vigilance in alerting parents and school officials to even potential problems; the sheer size of the school bus that gives it an advantage in all but the most severe crashes; extensive federal safety requirements that exceed those for other passenger vehicles; and the skill, special licensing requirements and training of school bus drivers.

Each year, about 440,000 public school buses travel 4.3 billion miles, transporting 23.5 million school children. Over the past ten years, an average of nine school-age children died as occupants of school buses, and 22 were killed as pedestrians struck while getting on or off the bus (including those who were killed in snagging incidents).

Former State Director of School Transportation to join National Bus Sales.

2011-02-16T13:54:00.001-06:00

National Bus Sales, one of the largest new and used bus sales organizations in the United States, has announced that Randy McLerran, former Oklahoma Director of School Transportation, has joined their company as a School Transportation Specialist and Sales Representative. He was selected as National School Transportation Administrator of the Year 2001 and has received two national awards for his work in the safe transportation of students with special needs. Randy has served on the board of directors for NAPT and NASDPTS and is a former treasurer of NASDPTS. Randy, a frequent presenter and keynote speaker at school transportation conferences said “ I have enjoyed my 37 years in public education and serving as State Director of School Transportation for the State of Oklahoma for the last 20 years. However, I am excited to join National Bus Sales which is known for providing safe and quality school buses to school districts.”

National Bus Sales, Inc. has been in the bus business for over twenty years with its main headquarters in Tulsa, Oklahoma. National Bus Sales has a large selection of new and used school buses, new and used shuttle buses, special needs buses, and motorcoaches.

McLerran’s background in public education and certification as superintendent of schools and his extensive knowledge of rural and urban school operations will enable him to assist schools in finding solutions to their transportation needs in a cost efficient manner.

Background:
High School- Dill City, OK
B.A.- Southwest Oklahoma State University
M.Ed.-East Central State University
Post Grad-Oklahoma State University

Family-Wife Pam

On his Ipod-Chris Wall, Leon Russell, Marshall Tucker Band and blues

Hobbies-Yard work and learning to play golf

'Top 10' Ways to Cut Down on Cold Weather Fuel Costs

2011-01-14T11:49:00.001-06:00

These last few weeks, Jack Frost has taken a bite out of some of us while Mother Nature has shined warmly on others. It’s that time of the year again when weather conditions can change quickly without notice, for the best or the worst. But one thing you can count on this winter is that harsh operating conditions will happen fast, so you must be prepared.

Winter operations mean more fuel consumption, so here are 10 recommendations to maximize your fuel investment during cold weather. With over 6,000 clients using our Fuel Management solutions we have discovered these are the best ways to cut wasted fuel. Here is the list of Jack Lee’s Top Ten ways to cut down on cold weather fuel costs:

1. Train and educate your drivers: Your drivers can control fuel consumption each time they fire up their engines. Proper training can improve fuel efficiency, economy and emissions. Hard acceleration, speeding and idling are the biggest causes of fuel waste. Initiate a training course for drivers and reward participation.

2. Use Fuel Management Online Software: FMO is a software suite from 4Refuel that puts you in touch with all the fuel consumption data you will need to cut your fuel expenses, guaranteed. Information is available to your desk top including refueling location, the unit fueled and where fill ups were done. Tracking miles traveled, average speed and engine efficiency is critical to cutting fuel costs. This information will help your drivers and managers optimize routes with better planning. FMO sets up easily to import and export your data and it is incredibly user friendly.

3. Decrease Idling: Be aware of the time engines idle. Excessive idling ads to your fuel costs by as much as 50% and can shorten the life of engine oil by 75%, adding even more costs. Initiate a campaign to reduce idling time and reward participants. Allowing an engine to idle more than 3 minutes causes expensive damage which harms efficiency, shortens engine life and increases maintenance costs. It all adds up.

4. Start off slower and stop speeding: Jackrabbit starts waste fuel and save less than 3 minutes per hour driving, but can result in using 40% more fuel and increase toxic emissions by 400%! What’s the rush? Speeding is dangerous; it wastes fuel and creates higher levels of toxic emissions. Speeds over 100 km/hour drastically impact fuel efficiencies. Trucks traveling at 120 km/hour use 50% more fuel and they also emit 100% more carbon monoxide, 50% more hydrocarbons and 31% more nitrogen oxides.

5. Lose Weight: Excess weight places unnecessary strain on your vehicle’s engine and greatly affects its fuel efficiency. By removing as little as 100 pounds you can significantly improve your gas mileage. Check each vehicle and pitch out that unnecessary weight!

6. Upload your odometer readings to maximize fuel efficiency: FMO gives you the capability to compare mileage records with fuel consumption at the click of a mouse. When you have all this information, fleet management is simple, and you can cut fuel costs fast when you see a unit that is operating outside of predetermined thresholds.

7. Cut the time you spend calculating IFTA reporting: If you cross provincial, state or national borders you know how much time it takes to file International Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA) and time is part of calculating your true cost of fuel. FMO will cut your time spent gathering tax information for fleets that cross the U.S. - Canadian border. Refueling data can be batched by region to each specific refueling station so you know to which jurisdiction the fuel taxes are owed.

8. Upgrade your Fleet: Whenever possible, invest in modern, fuel-efficient vehicles. Modern diesel engines are far more fuel-efficient and perform better with modern diesel fuels such as ultra low sulfur diesel and bio-diesel. Measure each piece of equipment for fuel efficiency and get rid of the under performing ones.

9. Service your fleet regularly: This includes having a stringent, well-managed preventive maintenance policy. Regular tire pressure checks can help you cut fuel too. A well maintained vehicle performs better, improves fuel efficiency, reduces toxic emissions and, in the long run, will cost less to maintain. Gather monthly maintenance reports and match them to your fleet numbers and you will stay on top of each unit as well as expenses.

10. Import third-party refueling data: You can measure and manage your fleet better when you have all the information. If your fleet is on the move chances are you refuel from a number of sources whether it is on-site, via your own fuel storage tanks or at card locks. FMO pulls each source together in one report, by unit, so you can review, manage and eliminate wasted fuel.

Your winter fuel consumption will drop and so will your costs even if you employ only half of the suggestions above. That should give you some extra cash to use on heating your office and staying warm, rather than spewing those dollars out your tail pipe.

2010-11-08T11:22:00.001-06:00

Did everyone see the new buses that are being introduced to the market? International is bringing out a Type A bus and Starcraft is bringing out a Type C bus. What do you think the market place will be like when these buses are introduced? With a tight market for new buses already, isn’t it going to be hard for a bus manufacturer to make money?

Bus Banter

2010-07-27T09:40:00.006-05:00

Hello out there in the bus world. This is my first attempt at writing a blog. I believe the first thing that I am to do is tell a little bit about myself. I am the Sales Director here at National Bus Sales. National Bus Sales has been in business for over 20 years turning out some of the nation’s best reconditioned buses. I have been here over 6 years and have just recently become the Sales Director as we have expanded the number of sales people.

I want all of you that read this to understand that I will always be looking forward to your responses, questions, comments, jokes or subject suggestions concerning school buses, shuttle buses, coach or tour buses, activity buses, special education or lift buses, head start buses, people movers, church buses, corporate buses, used buses, new buses, and everything bus related. Remember to check out our website, nationalbus.com and look for us on Facebook and Twitter. Check out our great inventory of good used and reconditioned buses. We get in new inventory of buses every day. Check out all of the links on this page and look for more links on nationalbus.com.

Next time, I will get into whatever new item has come up in the bus world.

Bus Buffoonery (Jokes)

'Is everyone in the bus?' asked the driver before he closed the door. 'No,' called a lady, 'wait until I get my clothes on.' All the passengers in the bus turned towards the door to look at the woman. She got on with a bag full of laundry.

Safety for School Buses...Industry New by National Bus Sales

2010-05-11T10:52:00.006-05:00

It is heartbreaking to hear stories of children getting hurt or killed by a school bus....school buses are supposed to be a safety zone for our children but in fact from kids getting beat to death inside a school bus to children being run over it is a very serious problem.....Just recently a Colorado elementary student 12 years of age was run over by a school bus...In Little Rock, AR, a student opened the emergency door exit and fell out of the bus, hitting his head on the pavement...he later died that same day....
I believe that it is very important for each state to have strict laws governing the safety and procedures for school bus drivers along with strict guidelines in safety to which the schools are ordered to up hold....
Every state is different....some have crossing gates...some now have video camera's....some states and school districts have discussed having a extra person on board other than the driver to help regulate students....I don't know what the magic solution is but I do know that all of us; school district, contractors, teacher, and mothers need to come together and make sure we are doing everything possible to help address the issues in our districts.....
A good resource online is 2safeschools.org....they are a Internet resource with the purpose of helping save a child's life...they have video's and training material for school districts to use....Please check them out....
National Bus Sales in Tulsa, Oklahoma leads the nation in providing quality, used, late-model, low-mileage buses at the lowest price. We offer the highest quality pre-owned and reconditioned buses available. We sell used school buses, activity buses, wheelchair lift buses, child care buses, church buses, passenger motor coaches, and shuttle buses. Whether you are a school district, bus contractor or tour operator, we can serve virtually any need.

School Bus Ads in OK??

2010-04-29T10:31:00.003-05:00

As I have commented before, School Bus Ad's are becoming more and more a hot topic and many schools have varied opinions as to if this is really a good idea or not....just recently the bill passed the house in Oklahoma and now goes back to the Senate for approval...This bill has already been approved in many other states for the use of school districts to use bus advertising--These states include Colorado, Arizona, Florida, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas. The idea behind the bill is to give the school districts a chance to generate extra money that would help offset cuts caused by budget downturn...

I believe it can help benefit some of the smaller school districts...but then again the smaller the school district the smaller the resource it is to find businesses to advertise....Also, do we really want all that distraction on the road??? Isn't and shouldn't our #1 goal be to make sure our students are safe??

I'm on the fence, I think there is a lot of things still left to consider for schools...like who sets up the cost of the ads??? Who will sell the ads?? Who will manage the funds?? Does the outcome really benefit the school?? Will it save jobs?? Pay for new buses?? Pay for paper??

Time will tell!! As schools implement and decide to do this we should be able to help other schools know the ups and down....

But for now here at National Bus Sales, we have a in house graphic designer who can design ads to help school districts with this process...

Safety for School Buses...Industry New by National Bus Sales

2010-04-07T12:13:00.006-05:00

I was recently driving my kids to school in Ok and in our neighborhood the school bus was stopped and a child was laying/sitting on the ground beside it….I waited several minutes because my son said that this child had some mental problems so I thought maybe he just didn’t want to get on the bus….No one came to his aid and I realize no-matter what the issue is/was I should of went to help ( I will not make that mistake again)….after several minutes I finally pulled around the bus so I could get my child to school on time…..After I returned that afternoon I was told that the child had been hit by that school bus….I have no idea how the driver could of hit that child and why was the driver or anyone else in the bus helping him….he suffered some internal injuries but is fine…that’s the good news….so this is an example of why safety on school buses is so important….children have been run over and even killed because drivers didn’t see kids….In LA, they require crossing gates that helps drivers see children at all times, this has proven to be very helpful and a small cost for school…

The newest craze and in some states legislation has passed to help enforce safety at the bus stop. Cameras are not only being installed inside the bus but on the outside as well. Buses are being installed with as many as eight cameras each.
Camera’s can also help in catching drivers that run stop signs which in turn is danger to our children. It seems odd but this happens a lot as these drivers are trying to stay on time.

I think that schools should be looking at the latest technology in safety ….for it is the safety of those children that should be their #1 goal at any cost….If God preserves his children shouldn’t we do everything humanly possible to do the same???
Psalm 97.10 “O you who love the lord, hate evil: He preserves the lives of his saints (the children of God).

National Bus Sales in Tulsa, Oklahoma leads the nation in providing quality, used, late-model, low-mileage buses at the lowest price. We offer the highest quality pre-owned, and reconditioned buses available. We sell used school buses, activity buses, wheelchair lift buses, child care buses, church buses, passenger motor coaches, and shuttle buses. Whether you are a school district, bus contractor or tour operator, we can serve virtually any need.

Alternative Ways to Fund School Transportation

2010-03-23T13:08:00.003-05:00

According to the Associated Press, schools in Arizona, California, Florida, Colorado, Minnesota, Tennessee and Texas currently allow school bus advertising, and other states are currently considering allowing this practice as well. With the economic down turn and with major budget cuts to school districts schools are trying to be creative in how to make up the gap. One Idea seems to be to sell advertising space on the side of a school bus. For Example Jefferson County Schools in Colorado signed a 4 year contract with First Bank for $500,000 to advertise on 100 buses plus at school events....the thought is that this money will help keep buses funded and on the road.....What we have been doing for years here at National Bus Sales is trying to educate schools of the money saving value of buying late-model school buses at a fraction of the price of a new one....most of buses only have a few thousand miles while offering big saving to a school....if those school districts who only buy new could get a hold of this concept it would be a great savings to them without compromising quality.....We are now starting to see more than ever larger school districts coming to us for help!!!! Were here to help all those in need find transportation solutions to fit your budget!!!

INDUSTRY NEWS by National Bus Sales

2010-03-02T11:38:00.001-06:00

Did you know the nation's school bus fleet of 480,000 vehicles is the safest, most environmentally responsible way to get kids to school - and because each bus takes an average of 36 cars off the road it saves energy and eases congestion as well. A public education campaign is needed to communicate these benefits to students, parents and state and local elected officials. Please help with your local law official….

National Bus Sales in Tulsa, Oklahoma lead the nation in providing quality , used, late-model, low-mileage buses at the lowest price. We offer the highest quality pre-owned, and reconditioned buses available. We sell used school buses, activity buses, wheelchair lift buses, child care buses, church buses, passenger motor coaches, and shuttle buses. Whether you are a school district, bus contractor or tour operator, we can serve virtually any need.

INDUSTRY NEWS from National Bus Sales

2010-03-02T09:11:00.002-06:00

Many public buses and other forms of transportation are testing public Wi-Fi, with the Vail School District now testing Wi-Fi on school buses.

Instead of sitting around chatting or listening to music, students are now quietly working on their laptops on the way to school. The students also have refrained from the rowdy behavior that previously took place on the bus.

“It’s made a big difference,” said JJ Johnson, No. 92 school bus driver, to the N.Y. Times that the system involves a $200 router, $60-per month ISP contract, and a trial run on a four-hour bus ride to a soccer tournament. Most students slept during the bus ride that departed at 4 a.m., but the Wi-Fi was used in between soccer games during the tournament. Students also utilized the rolling Wi-Fi hotspot on the trip back to the school.

It’s not uncommon that metropolitan and some larger suburban areas don’t require school buses, but Wi-Fi could help increase productivity in rural areas. Autonet Mobile, which offers the custom router for buses, has provided similar hardware to schools in Missouri, Florida and Washington D.C.

Some school districts face budget issues, but could be willing to make exceptions, if possible, to provide funding for wireless Internet on School buses. Some school districts have planned studies to gauge students interest and overall cost efficiency of supporting Wi-Fi on some buses.

National Bus Sales in Tulsa, Oklahoma leads the nation in providing quality, used, late-model, low-mileage buses at the lowest price. We offer the highest quality used, pre-owned and reconditioned buses available. We sell used school buses, activity buses, wheelchair lift buses, child care buses, church buses, passenger motor coaches, and shuttle buses. Whether you are a school district, bus contractor, or tour operator, we can serve virtually any need.

Industry News from National Bus Sales

2010-02-04T12:06:00.001-06:00

California Supreme Court Rejects State's Appeal of Lower Court Ruling: Raids on Public Transportation Funding Are Illegal

SACRAMENTO - In a resounding victory for those who provide and those who depend on public transit in California, the State Supreme Court late yesterday rejected the Schwarzenegger Administration's appeal of a lower court ruling that annual raids on transit funding are illegal. By declining to accept the Petition for Review filed by state officials, the high court upheld the ruling of the Third District Court of Appeal that recent funding diversions violated a series of statutory and constitutional amendments enacted by voters via four statewide initiatives dating back to 1990.

"By denying the state's appeal, the Supreme Court has affirmed once and for all what we always maintained was true: that it's illegal to shift dedicated state transit funds away from transit agencies and their riders," said Joshua Shaw, Executive Director of the California Transit Association and lead plaintiff in the case. "This decision validates our position that this practice has been illegal since even before 2007, and that the definition of mass transportation adopted by lawmakers since then to mask these diversions is illegal."

Public transit officials now hope to work with the Administration and Legislature to restore those funds taken since the Association filed the initial lawsuit in October, 2007, on the heels of the 2007-08 state budget package that raided $1.19 billion from the Public Transportation Account (PTA). Since that agreement, more than $3 billion in transit funding has been re-routed to fill holes in the General Fund.

"This is a clear victory for the millions of Californians who depend every day on public transit to get to work, go to school and access vital health care facilities," said Michael Burns, General Manager of the Santa Clara Valley Transportation Authority and Chair of the Association's Executive Committee. "Public transit has certainly borne more than its fair share of the budget burden in recent years, and we see the effects of that throughout the state in the form of fare increases, transit service reductions, job layoffs and more. We're very hopeful that the high court's decision will now enable us to work with lawmakers to restore these funds and help us to meet the ever-increasing demands for transit services in California."

In its original lawsuit, the Association maintained that several successful ballot measures -- from 1990's Proposition 116 through Proposition 1A of 2006 -- established the PTA as a trust fund and require that PTA revenues must be spent on "mass transportation purposes."

The initial Superior Court decision, issued in January of 2008, ruled that the 2007-08 budget violated the law by diverting $409 million from the PTA to reimburse the General Fund for past debt service payments on Proposition 108 bonds. The ruling declared that the shift "does not serve any transportation planning or mass transportation purpose." At the same time, however, the Court permitted an additional $779 million transfer from the PTA to cover home-to-school busing and other programs that public transit advocates argued did not meet the definition of "mass transportation" as expressed in Proposition 116, which voters approved with the intent of establishing the PTA as a trust fund to support true public transportation service.

Just two weeks after the Superior Court ruling, the Legislature re-instated the $409 million worth of cuts by reconfiguring the law on which the court's decision was based, meaning that the entire $1.19 billion rightfully intended for public transportation funding had been raided. The Association filed its appeal of the Superior Court decision last September.

On June 30 of this year, the appellate court dismissed the State's claims that it is legal to divert PTA revenues before they are deposited in the PTA, and also that it is within the purview of the Legislature to transfer "spillover" funds from the PTA to the Mass Transportation Fund (MTF). "The MTF was created in 2007 by budget writers as a mechanism to perpetrate the diversion of transit funding to non-transit purposes," Shaw explained. "By shifting PTA money into the 'Mass Transportation Fund,' they sought to create a veneer of legitimacy for these diversions.The appellate court rejected this legerdemain."

Another key component of the appellate court's decision was its definition of "mass transportation purposes" specified by the initiatives. The court denied the state's contention that the definition permitted the transfer of funds for home-to-school bus service, transport of disabled persons to regional centers funded by the Department of Developmental Services, repayment of Proposition 42 loans, payment of Proposition 116 bond debt service, and payment of the General Fund's obligation to fund bond debt service for non-transit general obligation bonds. These are all programs historically supported only by General Fund revenues; thus, when the budget writers diverted transit dollars to these programs, they hoped to achieve General Fund "savings."

"While we agree that these are all worthy programs, they simply don't fit the public's definition of mass transportation," said Shaw. "We feel the voters intended 'mass transportation' to mean 'public transportation' or 'public transit,' and the appellate court agreed."

By skirting the intention of the initiatives, budget crafters diverted more than $5 billion of transit funding this decade - nearly $3.5 billion in the last three budget cycles alone. Transit funding took an additional critical blow when the budget agreement enacted in February of this year eliminated the State Transit Assistance program.

But proponents of the legal action saw the suit as being about more than just money to keep transit moving.

"Four times since 1990 - and with overwhelming approval - voters have clearly and repeatedly expressed their demands for dedicated transit funding," Shaw noted, "and their will has been repeatedly circumvented by those responsible for crafting the state budget."

"Furthermore, our original lawsuit strikes at the heart of the gimmicks that have been employed year after year in putting together the state budget," he added. "We recognize the horrendous crunch that the budget crafters face, but the fact that the California Supreme Court would not even hear the state's request for an appeal of the appellate court decision is one more obvious sign that the whole budget process needs serious reform."

Industry News from National Bus Sales

2010-02-04T12:05:00.004-06:00

IC Bus, North America’s largest school bus and commercial bus manufacturer, solidifies its dealer network with the announcement of new dealerships in Tennessee, West Virginia, California and Western Canada.

“We are pleased to welcome these dealers to the IC Bus family,” said John McKinney, Vice President and General Manager for IC Bus, a Navistar, Inc. company. “These dealers symbolize the strength and ideals of IC Bus and will provide IC Bus customers in the commercial and school bus markets the service they expect and deserve.”

The four new dealerships span the United States and Canada, bringing the total number of dealers in North America to 47. The new dealerships include:

Cumberland IC Bus Sales, [Nashville, Tenn..]

The authorized IC Bus dealer for both school and commercial applications in the state of Tennessee, Cumberland IC Bus Sales is a complete integrated transportation solution that encompasses parts, service, technician training and more.

“Cumberland International continues to expand to better serve the needs of our customer and is proud to announce a new addition to our family, IC Bus,” said Terry Minor, Dealer Principal for Cumberland International. “Cumberland IC Bus Sales is dedicated to setting a new standard in the bus business through world class products and services.”

BWAB International [White Sulphur Springs, W.Va.]

Covering the state of West Virginia, BWAB International brings a history of solution-based selling and customer focus to the IC school and commercial bus product line.

“In addition to selling our full line of IC products, BWAB International will maintain a strong focus on customer service and after-sale support throughout West Virginia,” said Mike Touey, Dealer Principal for BWAB International.

Creative Bus Sales, [Chino, Calif.]

Creative Bus Sales, the nation's largest commercial bus dealership, has always focused on how to best meet the needs of their customers. This focus will now be extended to the school bus market in California.

“In addition to being one of the largest and most successful commercial bus dealers in North America, Creative Bus Sales brings a seasoned school bus sales team to California,” said Tony Matijevich, Dealer Principal for Creative Bus Sales.

Western Canada IC Bus, [Alberta, Saskatchewan, and British Columbia]

The most recognized International Dealers in Canada have joined together to create Western Canada IC Bus with over 40 parts and service locations in place to ensure customer satisfaction for the life of the bus. Their goal is to ensure customers have the safest bus with the most up-time and the lowest cost of ownership.

“We understand that getting our bus customers’ ‘Precious Cargo’ to its destination and back, safely and reliably, is the number one concern,” said Patrick Braaten, CFO for Western Canada IC Bus.

Industry News from National Bus Sales

2010-02-04T12:05:00.003-06:00

The number of school buses sold in North America fell 8.1 percent in 2009, marking the third year of decline in a row.

North American school bus sales dropped 8.1 percent in 2009, marking the third year of decline in a row.

There were 35,740 school buses sold in the U.S. and Canada in the 2009 sales year (Nov. 1, 2008, to Oct. 31, 2009), down from 38,873 in 2008. Compared to the 2006 peak of 47,614 units sold, the 2009 total was down 25 percent.

School bus operations across the nation have been hit hard by budget cuts, prompting many to delay the purchase of new buses to replace aging models. National Bus Sales is an ideal solution to budget problems. Because we specialize in late model fully reconditioned buses, you can get more value for your money.

There had seemed to be the possibility of a jump in sales this year due to pre-buying ahead of the 2010 EPA emissions standards, which will raise the price of a school bus. Although there was a significant such sales increase in 2006, before the 2007 EPA standards, that trend did not materialize in 2009.

In SBF’s recent School District Survey, only 10 percent of respondents said they bought more buses this year than they normally would have due to the 2010 standards.

Despite the price increases next year, school bus manufacturers told SBF that they are projecting sales to be about the same.

A full breakdown of sales in 2009 as well as previous years will appear in SBF’s forthcoming 2010 Fact Book.

Approaches to Protect Students in Loading Zones

2010-02-04T12:03:00.002-06:00

Recent student fatalities highlight the importance of maximizing safety in and around this area at schools. Pupil transportation industry professionals offer many effective ways to do so, from separating groups of traffic to implementing detailed policies for bus drivers to providing training for students. Communicating with school staff and parents is essential.

Pictured is the bus loop at Highland Elementary School in Derby, N.Y. Motorists are prohibited from entering the bus loops at all of Lake Shore Central School District’s elementary schools to help prevent students from being injured.

Data published by the Kansas State Department of Education indicate that there have been several student fatalities in bus loading and unloading zones at schools in recent years.

According to the latest National School Bus Loading & Unloading Survey, from 2004 to 2007, one fatality occurred while students were unloading from buses in the morning, and one fatality occurred while students were boarding buses in the afternoon.

This year, SCHOOL BUS FLEET has learned of two fatal bus drop-off accidents at schools. In January, pre-kindergartner Jameer Woodley was crossing his school's parking lot in Courtland, Va., after disembarking his bus when he was struck by another bus. The Southampton County Sheriff's Office investigated the accident. The second bus had completed its unloading, and the driver received a signal that the area was clear. The driver pulled the bus out of its parking space and made a right turn into the travel lane of the parking lot. Woodley was crossing the travel lane when he was struck by the bus.

The following month, fourth-grader Christopher Beltz left his bus in the parking lot at Spring Mill Elementary School in Indianapolis' Washington Township. A lieutenant for the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department said in a news conference that when Beltz ran out of his bus, he darted between a row of cars parked between where he was dropped off and the school building. There was also a bus there that had just dropped off another student at the curb. As that bus was leaving, Beltz ran in front of it.

These fatalities show that industry officials must remain vigilant and employ every means at their disposal to maintain student safety in bus loading zones to prevent accidents.
"I think the event in Washington Township serves as a reminder that just because you've done your process for umpteen years, it deserves evaluation for the potential of improvement," says Pete Baxter, school transportation director at the Indiana Department of Education (DOE).

Southampton County Public Schools (SCPS) and Metropolitan School District of Washington Township (MSDWT) officials recognized this in the wake of the accidents on their school campuses this year and have changed their loading zone policies.

Pupil transportation industry professionals have numerous suggestions for how to maximize student safety in loading zones, and many practices have been implemented at operations around the country.

Districts enforce preventive measures
Following the accident in Courtland, Va., SCPS changed its bus unloading procedure. Superintendent Charles Turner wrote in a letter to parents that students would be "unloaded directly in front of the entryway at the curb during the morning, one bus at a time."

MSDWT took the fatality at their elementary school very seriously as well. "I'll never get over it," Superintendent James Mervilde says. "We need to do everything we can to make sure this never happens again."

The district's preventive measures are comprehensive. A safety task force that includes transportation officials, school administrators, traffic experts and educators was formed to evaluate transportation practices and associated traffic issues at each school.

Each school now has a schematic drawing created by the task force that displays an approved traffic flow for morning drop-off and afternoon pickup by buses and cars. School maps and the schematics are distributed to the bus drivers and parents and posted on the schools' Websites.

Traffic supervision has also improved. At least one trained security officer is required to be on duty at each school to direct traffic during morning drop-off and afternoon pick-up. In conjunction, more school staff members are assigned outside during arrival and departure times to ensure safety and parent compliance with revised procedures. To notify parents of the revised procedures, Mervilde taped a back-to-school message asking parents to listen to school officials in regard to where they are allowed to park their cars.

"We have some new principles," he adds. "When kids are moving, the buses can't be moving, and when the drivers are at their stops, they must turn off their buses." The drivers are also required to drop off kids at the curb, preventing them from walking across lanes of traffic.

In addition, MSDWT hired CSO Architects to conduct a district-wide evaluation of the school buildings, paying particular attention to traffic flow by school buses and cars. Upon completion, the company submitted proposal projects to improve safety and traffic flow at all of the schools. Spring Mill Elementary now has concrete barricades that define a crosswalk from a guest parking lot to a sidewalk on the north side of the building. Moreover, all buses must park on the front side of the school, and cars are restricted to a side parking lot.

Analyzing and separating traffic is encouraged
Pupil transportation professionals agree that analyzing the traffic flow in and around loading zones and separating school buses from other types of traffic are excellent ways to prevent loading zone fatalities.

"Take a step back and look at the design of the loading zone," says Kathy Furneaux, executive director of Syracuse, N.Y.-based Pupil Transportation Safety Institute. "When you have a big melting pot of traffic, it really becomes problematic because of the blind spots around a bus."
Furneaux says separating traffic to increase safety does not always involve a major overhaul. She was recently asked by officials at a school in Liberty, N.Y., to evaluate their loading zone because they were having problems with traffic.

"It was as simple as moving a section of a parking lot over and putting in another lane," Furneaux reveals.
Ted Finlayson-Schueler, president of Safety Rules!, in Syracuse, N.Y., says that one of the best ways to analyze loading zones is to start before the buses arrive and continue until all stragglers have left. He recommends videotaping the process from a location where the entire area can be seen (the school rooftop, for instance) so that each vehicle's movement can be studied.

He also suggests getting a map of the school property and noting all of its entrances as well as parking lot/street entrances and identifying where each group (school buses, parents in their personal vehicles, school staff, students who walk to school, etc.) is currently accessing the building and its surrounding area.

Like Furneaux, Finlayson-Schueler encourages separating each class of traffic. This can be accomplished with space or time. "If parents are not let onto the school grounds in the afternoon until the buses have left, you have two loading zones separated by time instead of one that is dangerous and congested," Finlayson-Schueler explains. "In the same way, driving staff and students can be held in their parking lots until the buses are released, creating space for the buses to leave without having to share the roadway."

Schematics, like this one for Spring Mill Elementary, that display approved traffic flow for buses and cars have been created for all schools within the Metropolitan School District of Washington Township in Indianapolis to increase safety.

Finlayson-Schueler notes that special attention should be given to students who walk to school. "Walkers need to have clear direction about how to access and leave the school, and careful consideration should be given to their ability to do that without having to cross traffic while coming to or leaving the school. If walkers are held in the school until the buses leave, it can significantly reduce congestion," he says.

Fuel incentive program saves department $28K

2010-02-04T12:00:00.004-06:00

WALLED LAKE, Mich. — At its back-to-school meeting last year, Walled Lake Consolidated School District’s transportation department implemented a fuel incentive program that has increased its miles-per-gallon average, reduced bus idling and facilitated substantial cost savings.

Tim Stage, the department’s head mechanic, had calculated each school bus driver’s miles-per-gallon average for the last two months of the previous school year. The drivers were told during the meeting that he would also calculate their averages for the first two months of the upcoming school year.

“Tim calculated their averages in May and June first so that the drivers wouldn’t come in at the beginning of the school year and try to, by accelerating quickly, braking hard, etc., get their averages up,” explained Jill Segal, the district’s transportation supervisor.

Once it was determined that the drivers were achieving the same rates for the two time periods, the goal was for them to improve their averages by adhering to the district’s idling policy. The two drivers — one who operates a regular-ed bus and another who operates a special-needs bus — who improved their averages the most by the end of each month were allowed to park their buses in the department’s garage for the entirety of the following month while they were not on routes.

Stage used FleetVision by Tyler Technologies Inc. to assist in calculating each driver’s monthly average.
“Each time the buses fuel up, the mileage is recorded, so I write a report at the end of the month and it indicates the miles per gallon for each bus,” he explained.

Segal said that in determining the special-needs driver winners, the department took into consideration that the drivers may have idled their buses longer to accommodate the students’ needs during loading and unloading.
The program was implemented to help enforce the district’s idling policy and to offset rising fuel costs.

“Over the entire year, we averaged an increase from 7 miles per gallon to 7.5,” Segal revealed. “Using our price-per-gallon average for fuel last year, it ended up being a savings of about $28,000.”
Based on the program’s success, the department planned to run it again during the 2009-10 school year.

Industry News from National Bus Sales

2010-02-04T11:59:00.003-06:00

WASHINGTON, D.C. — With the fourth annual Love the Bus campaign just a couple of months away, materials are available to help operations honor their school bus drivers, raise awareness about school bus safety and to present the value of yellow school buses to students, parents and the community throughout the month of February.

The materials, created by the American School Bus Council, include a press release template for local media market use and a Love the Bus toolkit to help operations participate in Love the Bus activities.

The press release template contains information on the purpose of the Love the Bus program, ways for parents, teachers and children to demonstrate their appreciation for bus drivers, and the qualifications necessary to become a school bus driver. There are spaces in the press release for school districts or bus companies to insert information and data about their operation.

The toolkit offers numerous suggestions for celebrating the program and bus drivers, including asking students to submit testimonials on their favorite bus drivers, creating valentines for drivers and presenting them on Valentine’s Day, and inviting parents and local media to attend a Love the Bus event to show bus drivers how much they are valued.

Moreover, fact sheets within the kit can be distributed to students and parents to teach them about school bus safety; the kit also provides tips on how to communicate school transportation information to parents.

The National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services and the National School Transportation Association have sent the materials to their members and encouraged them to participate in Love the Bus.

Industry News from National Bus Sales

2010-02-04T11:58:00.001-06:00

BARRIE, Ontario — Shareholders have approved a resolution to change the corporate name of Student Transportation of America Ltd. to Student Transportation Inc.

Shares of the company, the third-largest school bus contractor in North America, will continue to trade under the ticker symbol "STB" on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

"By changing our corporate name, it better represents our North American footprint and will serve us well as we continue to grow," said Denis J. Gallagher, chairman and chief executive officer.

The company will retain the names Student Transportation of America for its U.S. subsidiary and Student Transportation of Canada for its Canadian operations.

"On the local level, we will also continue to retain the identities of the many companies we have acquired, preserving the goodwill they have built with their customers and communities," Gallagher noted.

The company also announced that its board of directors is considering a dual listing of its common shares on a U.S. exchange. The listing, which could happen as early as the fall of 2010, would require certain regulatory approvals that would allow the company to market and sell its common shares to U.S. investors, something it believes would further increase liquidity by attracting new shareholders.

"Being able to list and market directly in the U.S. would allow us to expand our investor base and increase our relationships with U.S. and international investment banks familiar with our industry," Gallagher said.

Q&A: Still Secure After 25 Years

2010-02-04T11:57:00.001-06:00

As Q’Straint hits a milestone, President Jean-Marc Girardin discusses the company’s continuing quest to bolster the safety of passengers who use wheelchairs.
For 25 years now, Q’Straint has focused on the safety of passengers who use wheelchairs in school buses, transit buses and other vehicles.

In the 1970s, a team of students and specialists at Queen’s University in Ontario began exploring how wheelchair passengers could be safely secured while being transported. What they came up with was the first fully integrated four-point wheelchair passenger securement system. Q’Straint was then formed in 1984 to introduce the system to the transportation industry.

In a testament to Q’Straint’s reputation, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration asked the company in 1991 to contribute its expertise, testing and real-world experiences to the development of wheelchair transportation regulations related to the Americans with Disability Act.

Q’Straint President Jean-Marc Girardin discussed with SBF how the company and its securement technologies have evolved over the past decade and a half — and what challenges have appeared along the way.

SBF: Tell us about how Q’Straint was started.

JEAN-MARC GIRARDIN: The company was founded in 1984 as a result of acquiring the rights to an idea of the Queen’s University Mechanical Engineering Department. It was originally tried and used in Kingston, Ontario, on a fleet of paratransit vehicles for wheelchair passengers. From there, it was refined and introduced to the rest of Canada and into the U.S. market.

What have been some highlights in the company’s history?
One of our first big highlights was that we were the first securement company to apply sled crash testing to a wheelchair securement system. To date, we have independently tested over 300 different wheelchairs and mobility devices.

How have the company’s securement systems changed over the years?
There have been a lot of changes to securement technology over the years; we are proud to have led the way from the industry using a manual belt system to our revolutionary fully automatic retractors that are self-tensioning and knobless. With these, drivers no longer need to bend down and turn knobs, making their jobs much easier and reducing the possibility for back injuries.

How has the company itself changed over the years?
As the company has grown, our systems and processes have evolved and adapted to continually meet our customers’ needs. There have also been significant improvements in the use of technology, and enhancements to all aspects of our operations, quality systems and testing. However, the things that have not changed are our people’s commitments to continually improve our company and to keeping our customers happy. We always strive to do the right thing.
What would you say are the key innovations that Q’Straint has made?
We are proud of many things we have been fortunate to be the first to introduce. Some of those firsts that come to mind are: a fully integrated wheelchair and occupant restraint system, compartmentalized floor pockets instead of L-track, serialized kits, a comprehensive training program and training certificate, automatic and self-tensioning retractors (as mentioned earlier), the positive lock indicator on our L-track fitting, and first national training seminar, which is one of a kind.

We are also currently collaborating with 4One to introduce the first ever wheelchair securement station for the transit industry, called the Q’Pod. Already customers have stated that this is the most significant innovation our industry has seen in at least a decade and it will become the new standard in wheelchair passenger safety and simplicity.

How have wheelchairs changed in terms of safety since Q’Straint was founded?
Wheelchair design has been a big concern in our industry from the beginning. Wheelchair manufacturers have historically taken an ostrich approach to wheelchair transportation: buried their heads in the sand by stating that their wheelchairs were not designed to be transported. The reality is that all of the wheelchairs today are transported in some form, so it makes it very difficult to design wheelchair securements without the collaboration of the companies designing those wheelchairs.

Also, electric wheelchairs have now become the most popular style of wheelchair, but have been designed with little to no attachment points for the wheelchair restraints, making it extremely difficult for drivers to secure them.
However, we see this starting to change, as many wheelchair manufacturers are getting involved with standards like WC-19, which addresses designing wheelchairs to make them more transportable. This standard is not well known, but we hope it will be widely used in the near future to improve the safety of wheelchair passenger transportation.

What would you say is the biggest challenge facing the school bus industry?
Funding without a doubt. Retrofitting existing vehicle fleets to use state-of-the-art wheelchair and occupant securements is becoming more of a reality. It’s an upfront investment, but in the long run, we’ve demonstrated that using the latest technology will not only improve the efficiency and effectiveness of securing wheelchair passengers, it will save the agencies money by reducing driver injuries, system maintenance and the liability created by the use of older, defective systems. So getting adequate funding to address this — safe, easy, universalized securement on all buses in a fleet — would be a major step toward reducing the current issues. Q’Straint is also introducing a special program specifically designed to help with this, and we look forward to partnering and sharing it with the school bus industry.

Q’Straint has been providing free training seminars each year for school bus professionals. Tell us about why the company does that.
Improper use of our wheelchair securement systems is one of the biggest challenges we face today. We believe proper training is absolutely critical and the most effective way to address this. Any company can say this, but we decided to put our money where our mouth is and made sure lack of funding was never a barrier. So each fall we host three two-day seminars where transit, paratransit and school bus agencies can send their key training personnel to be trained by us directly for free. In addition to this, we also provide onsite training by request and have a full line of comprehensive training programs for all our systems.

What is the company’s greatest strength?
Our customers and our people; they have made Q’Straint what it is today and continue to be the key to our success. We would not be here without our customers, and our people understand that. So everyone is committed to making our customers and their needs our No. 1 priority.

Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?
Since this year is our 25th anniversary, I want to take this opportunity to personally thank all of our customers for their support, and to all of our people for their loyalty to Q’Straint. I am also very proud that Q’Straint will continue to be a family-operated company for many years to come, as my three children, Julie, Eric and Patrick, are actively involved in Q’Straint and are committed to continuing to serve our customers.

Industry News from National Bus Sales

2010-02-04T11:41:00.002-06:00

2010-02-03T17:29:00.000-06:00

Steve and Shannon Henshaw owners of National Bus Sales, Inc....we will be using
this blog site to keep our current customers and potential customers updated
on thing going on within our organization, specials ect...along with posting
new articles about the industry to help keep transportation directors up to date
on things going on in the industry or their state....