While police forces are working with school transportation experts around the country to put a stop to the enormous number of drivers illegally passing stopped school buses, one school district is using a new innovative system to protect students crossing the street to get onboard their bus.
Wake County students in North Carolina will be learning a new system for crossing the road to board buses when they start the new school year, which the district believes will improve safety for over 80,000 children who ride daily according to local reports.
Starting in July, the loading process for bus-riding students will become a bit longer as students are told to wait until the driver extends a new crossing gate open on the front of the bus which tells students it is safe to cross.
The new system was demoed this week by students at Wilburn Elementary School in Raleigh, and officials told reporters they thought the new system would cut the risk of students being injured by motorists illegally passing stopped buses.
“It will be safer because the cars will stop,” Ashly Vasquez, a fifth-grade student at Wilburn told The News & Observer. “I almost got run over by a car once.”
According to estimates, approximately 3,000 to 3,500 automobiles illegally pass stopped buses in the state on a daily basis.
“We have years of data to show us that cars are not always going to stop when the school bus is stopped for loading and unloading of students with the red lights flashing and the stop arm extended,” Derek Graham, section chief of the state Department of Public Instruction’s transportation services division, says on a Wake school training video of the new bus procedures.
In the past, students in the district were instructed to leave the bus stop when the driver activated a single switch which turned on the flashing lights, opened the door, and extended the stop arm and crossing arm simultaneously.
However, using $400,000 from DPI, all buses within the district have been equipped with a multistep system which is common in newer buses but was not installed in most of the state’s buses.
