School Bus Torture Chamber

Today was the annual bus driver refresher course that we who drive busses are required to take on a yearly basis. This meeting can be what my friend NUT would call, a torture chamber. Today was no exception. For every new rule that can be come up with, there is a certain segment of the group inn the meeting who wants to know about every possible exception to that rule. This of course makes the meeting drag on and on. C’mon people! Just follow the dang rule instead of trying to find a way out of it.

One that will be very problematic for all of us bus drivers is that we can no longer idle our busses. Not only is it now against state regulation, but they build the newer buses in such a way that idling can damage them. This is fine if you are in a warmer weather climate, but we are not. It gets COLD, and SNOWY, and ICY here. One driver blew my secret I had last year by asking if we could bring a space heater and plug it into the extension chords that we plug the bus in. The answer was no. I don’t know why he asked. Just do it and keep your trap shut. I think I will forget by then. I just had one simple yes no question. Will the school then supply deicer since we can no longer warm up our buses? I never got an answer as the room erupted and the conversation was sidetracked. Well, if I have to use extra time to scrape the ice, I’ll just charge them for the time, and for any deicer I have to buy.

One issue I thought odd was when it came to tornadoes and school buses. We were told today to not evacuate the buses when a tornado is coming at us. Hmmm… Why is that, I asked. It seems the state has all sorts of stupid regulations about evacuating the bus in a tornado. The ditch has to be so deep, with only so many inches of water, and you have to be a mile away from any wires, etc etc… Well, there is no place that meets those regulations unless you drive in the booniest of boonies. Well, we can’t evacuate into say for example, someones basement on our route. You see, the state mandates that the ceiling must be eight feet high and that there is so many square feet available per pupil for it to be a proper shelter. Stopping at a fire department that has a shelter? We might exceed the shelter capacity. So, in order to best follow all of the state rules regarding child safety in evacuating for tornadoes, it is deemed best that we just leave them on the bus for the tornado to pick up and toss around. That is our great government for you.

Another interesting thing that I learned is that big brother is keeping track of all of us bus drivers. When we get to be 50, we are put into testing pools based on our lifetime of tickets. So, in other words, because I got a couple of tickets at 16 years old, at 50 I will be put into a pool of people more likely to be tested. What? And how does the FEDERAL government get these types of records anyway. Are not the states on control of license issues? Well, apparently after 9-11 and the patriot act, all of our driving records are now on a national database. Pretty interesting huh? Very quietly, the fed took over transportation from the states.

Is it any wonder why it is harder and harder to find people to drive our school buses? With all of the regulations and things they have us do to avoid litigation, it is a vastly underpaid profession. Not to mention dealing with all the snotty nosed kids on a daily basis. Yes we do have to make sure our drivers are qualified, and safe people. It is just getting to the point where you can’t even sneeze without the government telling us how to do it. Oh yeah, they do send out posters to the schools about the proper way to sneeze. Swine Flu y’know.