Riding the big yellow bus

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This article was published 27/05/2011 (5331 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

STONEWALL — Chris Penner has been majoring in school buses this year, riding the 42 Interlake School Division bus routes into Stonewall, Grosse Isle, Woodlands and other communities, covering all the gravel back roads and major highways.

“My goal was to get to know all of the bus drivers and know the lay of the land,” said Penner, the assistant superintendent of Interlake School Division. “Some bus runs are absolutely gorgeous. We go all the way to Lake Manitoba.”

If Penner’s name sounds familiar, it’s because she’s got experience in getting out of the office. She’s the one who, when she was vice-principal of St. John’s High School in Winnipeg School Division a few years ago, would spend each August knocking on doors in the North End and introducing herself to hundreds of new students and their parents.

Now with Interlake, Penner wanted to get to know the geographically vast division and see what challenges each bus driver responsible for dozens of children’s safety faces on the major highways and back roads for about 185 days a year.

“It’s a big responsibility to get the kids to school safely and back home safely. I’m so impressed with the confidence of our bus drivers, how they handle the road conditions,” Penner said, as school bus driver James McGillan steered his bus down the back roads north of Stonewall. “Sometimes there’s a fresh snowfall, it keeps you on your edge,” McGillan said.

Road conditions are the toughest challenge, said McGillan, who starts his morning run in darkness much of the school year and ends the afternoon run just ahead of sunset for many months. The rest of the time, he’s a church pastor.

Even in late April, there was plenty of snow north of Stonewall, though the roads were bare. But in winter, in darkness, there’s nothing but white, the ditches filled with snow and merging into the road.

“These roads, there’s no fence line, no poles; if you’re the first one on it in the morning (after a snowfall), it’s bad,” McGillan said.

Penner pointed out that older kids gravitate to the back of the bus, the smallest kids sitting as close to the driver as they can. Some drivers assign seats, some place the students’ names above the seats.

You’ve seen warming huts on cross-country ski trails? You’ll see them on a school bus run at the entrance of a farm’s long driveway.

“Some parents build little shelters for their kids,” Penner said.

What became quickly apparent as McGillan meandered the furthest reaches of his route is how many farm houses he passed without picking up a single child. Though he has 41 kids on his route, most of them come in bunches in the Stone Ridge Meadows subdivision and other areas just outside a 1.6-km range from Stonewall’s three schools, beyond which the division provides a free bus.

“You’re picking up less and less farm kids all the time,” McGillan said.

In the 1970s, two-thirds of the students in a class would have been farm kids, but not anymore, said Interlake superintendent Ross Metcalfe.

Transportation supervisor Ken Krulicki said a lot of properties are owned by empty-nester parents or corporate farms, but McGillan will go several kilometres up a road, even if it’s just for one pupil.

“We have a lot of farmers who drive the bus. We have one retired RCMP officer,” Penner noted.

McGillan has got all the safety gadgets the province has approved over the years.

Start with the arm that extends to the left from the front of the bus, so kids crossing from or to the far side stay within his view. Then there’s the strobe light atop the bus, ideal for spotting it in the dark or falling snow or rain or fog, and even in that moody Manitoba morning mist.

McGillan has two stop signs: “It has a reverse beeper, too.”

Yes, he has to reverse up a farm lane at times to turn around, a real adventure in snow, though the straightness of the rural roads helps.

His internal cameras have both audio and video, looping after about 48 hours of filming. When McGillan is on a route, “It runs all the time,” he said.

Every school bus made since 2000 has internal cameras, Krulicki explained.

Not all the kids are there waiting every morning — maybe half the parents will notify the division if they’re driving their children to school or their kids are sick, said McGillan, as he gave it a couple of minutes at one farm driveway bereft of waiting children.

He knows everyone on the route — one family moved here from Florida this year; at another there’s the son and a Mexican exchange student.

“Morning, James,” said several sleepy kids.

“I’m good, eh?” says one teenager to a greeting from McGillan and Penner. Says another, “I’m good, how are you?”

Autumn Good turned seven the day before, so Penner wished her a happy birthday.

Penner chatted up two little girls who sat at the front of the bus and was delighted to hear they were looking forward to gym class that day.

“I used to teach phys ed — I like it when kids like gym,” Penner told them.

Deciding whether to cancel school buses for weather is definitely a tires-on-the-road call long before dawn.

When it snows, “I try to get out on the roads at 4, 4:30 in the morning,” Krulicki said.

He’ll call neighbouring Sunrise and Lord Selkirk school divisions to discuss conditions and then Metcalfe makes the final call around 6 a.m.

“When everybody else is sleeping, Ken is out driving the back roads,” Metcalfe said. “Our moment of truth is between 6 and 6:10 a.m. — that’s when our system is up and running. By 6:20, it’s too late to shut down.”

nick.martin@freepress.mb.ca

 

Cameras catch scofflaws

 

NORTH OF STONEWALL — The little car pulled into the narrow oncoming lane and the driver floored it, roaring past the yellow school bus and its flashing caution lights, spewing dust and gravel first onto the bus on its right and then a few dozen metres later onto the kids on the left who were waiting to cross the road to climb aboard for school.

All to save a few seconds. You fool.

Moments like that give nightmares to school bus driver James McGillan, and moments like that have Interlake School Division demanding the province mount exterior cameras on school buses to nail motorists who drive like idiots around school buses packed with children.

“We have cars that will actually pass on the right side — that’s scary,” said Ken Krulicki, the division’s transportation supervisor.

When school buses slow to pick up kids, first come flashing yellows as a warning of an imminent stop, then red flashers and then two stop signs extend where any driver with a brain could see them.

“A lot of people try to beat the red light,” lamented Krulicki.

Interlake — with high schools in Stonewall, Warren and Teulon, and a slew of country schools — has a pilot project with external cameras on three buses this year.

“They’re activated when the stop sign is extended,” Krulicki said.

The problem the province is still pondering, said Krulicki, is how to capture on film both the licence plate and the face of the driver.

“We’re leading the charge across North America,” declared superintendent Ross Metcalfe.

The external cameras cost $1,500 each and Manitoba public schools run about 1,800 buses.