Amy Rock (00:00): Hi everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Campus Safety Voices podcast. My name is Amy Rock. I'm Campus Safety’s executive editor, and joining me today is Jeff Baird, a now-retired transportation manager for a large school district in Kansas City who took a talent and knowledge to Transportant Solutions, which specializes in school bus safety technology.

Now today we're going to talk about school bus technology, obviously and how it makes school buses safer. But I wanted to ask some questions about your experience as a transportation manager, Jeff, as a lot of our readers are charged with transportation safety and all that that entails. So when you worked in that role, did you feel -- and maybe not within your school district, it could be with other people in similar roles that you spoke to -- but did you feel school bus safety was kind of an afterthought when it came to school safety planning? And if so, why?

Jeff Baird (00:49): So I feel like most all the districts I was exposed to, safety was paramount. The administrators, the school board and the parents demand safety. So if you're not safety conscious, it'll be hard for you to keep pace in a school transportation environment. So I think where you can get into trouble is if the transportation director does not convey the needs of the department. So if you're not making it clear that these buses need to be replaced, this technology needs to be upgraded, those are the things that can give you less preparation for a safe bus.

Amy Rock (01:35): Yeah, absolutely. Now, why do you feel, and I'm sure you can speak from a lot of experiences, but why do you think it's so important for school bus safety to be included in the school safety discussion?

Jeff Baird (01:47): Because the kids are focused, parents are focused on the seven hours a day that students are in class, and there can be an outlook that says, ‘Hey, I'm out of class. I can let loose. It's been a stressful day, and the bus is a different environment.” You've got 55 kids on the bus and their leader has their back to them, and their main focus is not the kids, although keeping them safe is, their focus is on the cars in front of them. So school bus safety has to be paramount.

The other thing is that a little distraction can go a long way towards lowering the quality and safety of the ride. So our job as managers is to keep their head in the game with the little details that they need to be safe.

Amy Rock (02:45): We know that's true even when we're just driving, we see distracted driving these days, all it takes is two seconds looking down at something that's not the road to be something potentially catastrophic.

Jeff Baird (02:56): Right. And if you pull up behind a school bus and you see that they're way back from the car in front of them, they're required by training and by law to stop. They have to be able to see where the tire touches the road of the car in front of them, and that keeps any last second rear end collisions from happening. Little things like that that are skills are really important.

Amy Rock (03:25): Do you have any examples when you were in your role of when it proved that school bus drivers and also transportation managers being involved in school safety planning is crucial?

Jeff Baird (03:35): Yes. So for the first five years, every summer we would train drivers on how to deal with intruders on the school bus. The school safety director would have his people come over and conduct a training on how to maintain the safety of the bus. We made it known that to step on a bus was against guidelines in the law. And so we took that pretty seriously, but we never used it until we did. And then one day in my fifth year, an intruder tried to get on a bus to go somewhere or to take the bus somewhere, and the driver followed the training precisely and then called it in after she got him off the bus, shut the door and drove forward until she was out of danger. And then he tried to get on another bus and that driver followed the training precisely, and we dispatched the police into the area, they got 'em and everything turned out well. And this is a story that you won't hear about because it worked, so you don't hear the stories about school bus safety that were excellent. You hear about the tragedies on the news.

Amy Rock (04:52): Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there was no way for those drivers to know that person's intention and thankfully you never had to because they followed the proper training. Now, what were some of the biggest challenges you faced in your role? You said you were in it for seven years.

Jeff Baird (05:13): So you'll hear a lot about a school bus driver shortage, but I really think that the problem is we don't retain the drivers long enough. So we would have an average driver stay two and a half years. And if we could increase that to three years, that dramatically reduced the number of drivers we had to train and it kept the experience there. People say, ‘Well, do you pay 'em enough?’ First thing you have to do is engage them and include them in on what you're doing. Good management skills.
The second thing is their needs have to matter. When I got there, I said, ‘What do you need from me?’ And they would say, ‘I want you to have my back.’ I said, ‘Well, what does that mean?’ ‘Well, this happened and they didn't support me.’ So we have a system that I left there with that when something happened, we pulled video, we went over with the driver, we looked at it together, we cooperated and we came to the same conclusion. It wasn't a discussion from differing points of view, it was in front of us on the video. So we used what we bought for safety for training.

Amy Rock (06:36): If someone feels like an afterthought, they're not going to feel valued, and they see dangerous situations on the road on a regular basis and are driving dozens of kids. So someone could argue that they need to be included more so, because I obviously don't know any specific statistics, but it's safe to say that there's probably more school bus injuries than there are someone injured in a severe crisis situation inside of school.

Jeff Baird (07:01): Yeah. I think in the last 10 years, there was something like 13 fatalities on school buses. That's less than two a year.

Amy Rock (07:12): Which is low.

Jeff Baird (07:14): Right. The two that happen every year are horrific, but we've had major accidents where not a scratch was on the school bus. A car pulls out in front and we make contact and the car is totaled and the school bus doesn't have a scratch.

Amy Rock (07:35): Yeah, I think I was reading a study that said there's more injuries to the other person driving than there are other people on the school bus. Obviously, just by the size and weight, a bus has that advantage if there is a crash.

Jeff Baird (07:49): And so to put it in perspective, we drove 1.2 million miles a year, which is to the moon and back a couple times. And we would take 6,000 kids a day, 174 days a year. So that's 600,000 kids on buses total. And every district does that all year long. So the more we can do training wise to keep drivers focused on the road, the better we can be.

Amy Rock (08:26): While we're talking about school bus safety and kind of statistics, are there any misconceptions that you find about school buses and how safe they are?

Jeff Baird (08:37): So the thing that is a truth, it's not a misconception, is that misbehaving happens on a bus. The misconception would be that it's always someone else's fault. And it's a real problem in today's culture because if you don't have a video about something, it didn't happen. And back in my day, Harvey was my school bus driver, and if you misbehaved on your way out of the bus, he would say, ‘Don’t come back for a week.’ I'm not saying Harvey was right, but that's how it was. And so we have to have a relationship with the parents that works , and sometimes that means engaging school administration and building the relationship through them. So when I got the transporting section software, I went to the school principals and said, ‘I want to give you access.’ And my peers said, ‘Why would you do that? They can see everything you do.’ And my answer was, ‘We’ll get better.’ And so we ended up with 250 school district personnel with access to bus video, and we had some guidelines on that. You couldn't look up your friend Johnny's bus ride to see if it was his fault . You could only use it for school business purposes. And instead of them saying, ‘You're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong, you're doing this wrong.’ What they said was, ‘I can't imagine what your drivers are up against every day until I saw it.’

Amy Rock (10:30): I can't imagine. Now, you gave Harvey's maybe extreme example of approaching school bus safety, but what do you think are some must haves that schools need for their school bus policies and procedures to ensure the greatest level of safety for students and drivers?

Jeff Baird (10:46): So a lot of districts will say transportation needs to make the consequence decisions. Other districts will say the school has to make them. I say, we make them in partnership and that's what we did at Liberty, and that works extremely well. And when there's a severe situation, I would always defer to the school administrator because they know the kid's backstory, they know the family situation, they know how he's doing in school. So it's important to have compassion and empathy for the students and their circumstances while you maintain the boundaries on the bus.

Amy Rock (11:33): Now, would you say it should be standard, or maybe it is, and I'm just not aware for schools to inform drivers of kids that might have some behavioral issues or issues going on at home. Is that a policy or procedure that you think should be followed?

Jeff Baird (11:52): Yes. Two years ago, we got to the point where we were able to take the medical concerns and emotional behavior concerns of kids and pull out the ones that were relevant. And we had 1,200 out of 13,000 kids with medical-specific concerns that we needed to make aware to the bus drivers. And so we did that by tagging the student so that when they sign into the bus with their cards, the tag shows up to the driver only that shows prone to seizure or something like that. We had a student that was having silent seizures, and so we were able to inform the driver up front what the characteristics were. And when that started, the driver turned the bus off, told the kids to stay put, got the kid outside the bus, laid 'em down, tended to 'em until EMTs got there and you could see the student being cared for in the doorway camera. And so we were actually with that student having a seizure on route while he was being given first aid.

I read a case study about a school district down south that probably about 20 years ago, the bus got hijacked and they took it and buried the kids in the bus with the driver, and it took them over an hour to figure out who was on the bus at that time.

When you would call into our district and ask if Johnny's on the bus, we'd go in, we look, 'Yep, he got on at 2:52 at this school and he's going to get off at the next stop at 3:12" and we would know exactly where that child was, which is important. It's tremendously important.

Amy Rock (13:58): Yeah. I mean, it's also obviously for safety reasons, but I'm thinking, I remember a couple over this winter in our district, there was a really bad storm and they kids right in the middle of it. It was actually the worst time to do it, but all the buses were late and parents were calling and emailing and trying to have a sense of where their school bus was. Sounds like there's a lot of technologies available to kind of give parents a lot of peace of mind in different ways.

Jeff Baird (14:28): Well, on our bus app, they know where the bus is that their students on. They know how far away it is from the stop. And we had the ability to send notifications if the bus was going to be late. And we are actually working on an enhancement and we call the oops enhancement, -- OOPS, otherwise occupied parental supervisor -- which means when a kindergarten kid gets off, if you're not there to greet the kindergarten kid, the driver can push a button. You get a text that says Johnny's at the bus waiting for an adult to pick him up and you realize it was grandma's day and you call grandma and get him picked up. Those are the things that make a huge difference in student safety. So technology has taken us further than I could imagine. When I started there, I had an old director tell me, 'Jeff, you came at the right time because technology's not going to get any better. It's not going to change. It's the best it can be.' And it has done nothing but change.

And we have actually live video. And when I say live, I mean live streaming. So I could sit at my desk and be on any bus at any time observing any situation. We had a bus get rear-ended with a hit and run, and I was in the bus on the video before anything happened. And we actually could see the car, get a description, the driver got the license plate, and within 17 minutes, the police had the car apprehended based on the direction he turned. And that's unheard of, but I could also look in at the five cameras and see that no kids were hurt. So that is worth a lot. Live video.

There's wifi for the students' devices, there's global positioning, GPS, there's the parent app, bus attendance. Everything that you could have is under one roof. And the other thing is that if you need to access the video, what most districts have to do is they have to go pull a hard drive, bring it in, hook it to their computer and find it. With us, you can hit an incident button at 1:52 and it'll queue up to 1:52, send an alert to the office, and I'm on that alert at 1:52 and finding out what the distress was.

I had a program that I called 'seven.' Seven means that when an emergency happens, I want to be in contact with the student's parents before seven minutes are up. And what that does is it prevents narratives from being created and it prevents a he said, she said, and it becomes proactive. It's easy to ask a parent to help with Johnny's behavior and work together with us to turn him into the person that we know he is on the bus.

Amy Rock (18:03): Yep. 'Not my kid' is how they think. And then if you have video evidence, they can't really dispute that.

Jeff Baird (18:10): Right. I had a child that came home with a black and blue mark and parent thought that the kid was abused, and I brought him in to show him the video and they were furious. And what the video showed was the bus attendant being very compassionate after a bad day. And then once the kid got in their seat, the camera showed that the kid took the child's seat next to them, lifted her leg up on the main seat and started slamming it down on her own leg about 50 times. And that created a black and blue mark. And what that did is it built confidence in our operation with that family.

Amy Rock (18:58): Absolutely. Clearly going through something. Now, kind of speaking from the perspective, as a former transportation manager, what do you feel are some must haves for school bus safety technology solutions? You were obviously describing the one that you used in your district. What do you think is crucial? I know video obviously being one of them.

Jeff Baird (19:20): So the district in general has to be attuned to what the technology needs are on the bus. And the typical thing is we don't have the budget for something, but the reality is the operation, spending more money accomplishing it without the technology than they would with it. And so having the right budget and the right technology in your buses is very important. I think the other thing is there has to be a network with the community so that when something happens, I'm calling you up and saying, this is what we experienced on the bus today. And you're not trying to build trust. We've already built that with prior interactions.

Amy Rock (20:09): What if the school is interested in a technology like the one you work with now, but they might not have enough staffing or resources to monitor it on a regular basis.

Jeff Baird (20:20): So one of the things that I started with transport was a solutions program whereby we go into districts and do it for them. And that has been a hit with the small to mid-size districts who are under-resourced. I have one district I'm working with right now, and the same person runs transportation, is the transportation administrator, the administrative assistant for athletics and the administrative assistant for the high school. And they need help. So we try and provide that the best we can.

Amy Rock (21:01): And I was going to say, you worked in a larger school district, I believe, which obviously has its advantages because there's more access to resources, more finances, and smaller districts might not have that. So thank you for sharing that. And now kind of being on the technology side of things, what is something you wish you knew in your old role that would've helped you do your job even better?

Jeff Baird (21:23): So time compression is how you best use technology. So why do people get technology? It's to get better, but once you get better, if you don't use that better to do things faster, you're missing the point. So student discipline becomes student coaching. If you have good fast technology that you respond to, well, and I don't want to get too philosophical, but we need to raise our children in schools so that we're building relationships from the minute they step on the school bus. And the drivers that can do that have a tremendously obedient safe bus. They're not distracted by screaming, they're not. So it's important that we achieve that. And I didn't necessarily know the speed thing when I started, but it's become an asset.

A good example of that is what we call C and say C and say is, I'm a driver. Something's going on. It's not enough to stop the bus. So I hit the incident button. When I get back to the shop, I follow the incident button on the screen and it shows me all the video. From that moment in time, I can look at that and see it was in seat 12 that the student was misbehaving, and I can do screen prints. And tomorrow when the kids get on the bus, I can take the involved students and say, Hey, we got to stop this. And we do that before it becomes a discipline conduct report issue. The other interesting thing is that we have the ability to speak into the bus so we can take over the audio system in the bus. And the first time that that happened, the kids were like, they were shocked. A couple of middle school buses would make fun of me for having a low voice, and I didn't care if they did. I wanted the behavior to change.