When my brother was driving a school bus, we had just started the route for a driver that had called in sick. He told my brother before we left that the brakes were acting 'funny'. 2 miles into the route, he topped a hill and tried to brake and they didn't work. The curve was too sharp to recover and he flipped the bus on it's side. I hung onto the pole that was by the front seat. I still remember that windshield falling out and the stop sign curling up and clattering along the road. If there would have been kids on that bus, there would have been injuries and possibly deaths. All of the seat bottoms from one side fell out and crashed to the other side. I could just imagine what they would have done to a few young melons if they had hit them. On the way to school in a sub bus, the driver was the mechanic who just worked on it the day before and he was working on my brother's story, telling him there wasn't anything wrong with those brakes and he didn't need to be telling lies to cover his ass. When the report was filed, my brother stuck to his story. The mechanic was eventually fired- two years later when the front suspension fell out from underneath a bus on one side. Luckily, no injuries on that one, either.
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I believe the common argument is that if you have a problem like a fire or a bus that goes into a river, and kids are belted in, there are not enough adults to get the kids out of the restraints in time and that evacuation is quicker without belts in those circumstances. I know that those are few and far between but it only takes one or two of those events to cauterize the image in minds for a generation.
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Here's a wild thought: How about we do a lot less busing? Seems to me that when we bus kids to schools an hour and more away, when they have a school only a minutes away from home if they were to walk is asking for more of these problems.
Here's a wild thought: How about we do a lot less busing? Seems to me that when we bus kids to schools an hour and more away, when they have a school only a minutes away from home if they were to walk is asking for more of these problems.
Bruce, that may work back east where you mostly live in sardine-ville and a few other places of metro-concentration.
Out in most of the rest of the country, it's often miles upon miles between schools, period. This isn't the liberal "bus the kids all around and they'll all get a good education" theory, it's the traditional "bus the kids or they won't get to school" thing. And of course you have the field trips and sports events, etc. In any event I'm leaning in on McBear's idea: if you don't maintain the equipment properly and hire competent drivers, seatbelts aren't going to make a great deal of difference one way or the other. (That said, once you're out of the lower grades, kids know how to work seatbelts, so why aren't they at least in middle school and higher? Or put them in all the buses and if kids know how to buckle them they can buckle themselves in...and presumably unbuckle themselves if they got in them in the first place.)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Bruce R.
Here's a wild thought: How about we do a lot less busing? Seems to me that when we bus kids to schools an hour and more away, when they have a school only a minutes away from home if they were to walk is asking for more of these problems.
Why don't we cut teacher pay too? Those fuckers have been milking the system for years too.
Here's a wild thought: How about we do a lot less busing? Seems to me that when we bus kids to schools an hour and more away, when they have a school only a minutes away from home if they were to walk is asking for more of these problems.
How about we institute schools for the poor, blacks, Latinos and whites each separate based on how wealth and race is distributed in each region. I think you will be happy with this novel idea so your kids feel safer and learn more. Oh this way you won't have to pretend that you love everybody either, it will cut on useless PC talk. Happy now?
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