Clear heads required
Driving a school bus is no easy job. Kids by nature can be noisy and unruly, and driving safely amid such distraction requires skill and patience.
Drivers’ salaries do not nearly compensate them for the high level of responsibility with which they are entrusted.
In some rural districts, children may have an hour-long bus ride to school and thus spend 10 hours a week in the care of a driver who often does not get the respect and admiration he or she deserves.
Although the vast majority of bus drivers are clear-thinking and sober, a few rotten apples can make us skeptical of the whole barrel.
Parents can be forgiven for feeling a little trepidation when their kids head off for school or on school-sponsored trips following two recent incidents involving students from California Area High School and neighboring Westmoreland County.
Thirty-eight members of the California High School band and 17 others traveling with them to Nashville were temporarily stranded in Tennessee when highway patrolmen arrested their bus driver for driving under the influence of drugs.
Police conducting an inspection of the bus noticed the driver, Allen Newcomer, 51, had “an obvious amount of white powdery substance in his nostrils,” his pupils were constricted and his eyes barely reactive to light. A search turned up pill bottles – one marked hydrocodone – white powder and a straw.
Newcomer has been suspended without pay, and another driver was sent by the Fayette County charter company to operate the bus.
The least we can expect of our bus drivers is not to be high behind the wheel. We also might insist they have some degree of common sense, which apparently was not the case earlier this month in Harrison City.
The Associated Press reported a driver for First Student, which provides transportation for Penn-Trafford School District, allegedly asked an 11-year-old student to get off the bus and move a downed, live power line.
Penn Township police charged Patricia Ryan, 60, of Jeannette, with endangering the welfare of the boy. A West Penn Power crew was called to remove the line but had not yet arrived when police said she asked for a volunteer to move the line, which fell after being hit by a goose.
(We are not making this up!)
The boy’s hand was burned, but he was not seriously hurt. He might as easily have been electrocuted.
We have to wonder how a company could have hired possibly the only adult human being not aware of the danger of touching a downed electrical line.
Might the driver have reacted similarly to a large rabid dog, snarling and foaming at the mouth, impeding the path of the bus?
Would she have asked: “Who will volunteer to get the nice doggie to move to the side of the road?”
Ryan face a preliminary hearing May 31 and won’t be driving her bus before then.
Thank goodness for small favors!