I have always thought that the “unsafe to pass stopped school bus in either direction when lights are flashing” law conditioned a child to believe that any time they want to step into the road all traffic comes to a complete halt, regardless of crosswalks, stop signs or traffic lights. Many of them find out to their sorrow that this is not the case.
Not three, two - see my self-correction after black rabbit’s mention of elementary school.
Perhaps the kids were putting their coats on and the mother waived to the school bus to hang on a minute. If I was the driver, I’d wait too. Big deal.
I was busy all day, or I’d have piped in, so allow me.
As you see from my name, and Missy2U knows, I run the school buses for a large school district.
I agree. We tell kids to be waiting at their stop, and will NOT hold traffic so kids can get out the door when they see the bus. I fight with parents every week about this, but the rule is fair, safe and consistent.
DuckDuckGoose, couldn’t agree less with what you have to say. K-5 kids routinely in the state of Illinois walk up to .25 miles to a stop, and HS kids can have a stop as far away as half a mile. 1.5 miles, with the exception being if they have to walk through a designated ‘serious safety hazard’ is the distance that the state provides reimbursement to school districts for, and damn few districts in the state provide buses for kids they’re not reimbursed for. If your district’s policy is to stop at the end of every block, that’s an exception, not the norm.
The truth is, that all those parents driving their kids to school are MUCH more a safety hazard than letting the kids walk, or putting them on a bus. I’ve seen 200 cars lined up at a grade school dismissal. Not a pretty sight when everyone’s in a hurry to get their kid in the car and home, and not looking out for the ones walking.
“predators” are not 'cruising the neighborhoods looking for fresh meat, as a rule. Yes, it happens. If you’re a parent and there’s a predator in your neighborhood, you’re free to take your kid to school, or, I dunno…go to the bus stop with them? But no school district, transit service or community should have to make the kind of accommodations you’re talking about because they’re there. The notification law is just that - notification. Every parent in our school district gets a letter from the principal when a predator moves into their attendance area. Name, address and a link to the predator’s web page on the State Police site. Now you know he/she is there, take precautions. A lot of these people live where the smaller kids have to walk by their home (because they’re not a ride-eligible distance from school) to get to school.
Buses and bus stops are traffic issues. Good districts take that into consideration and when they can have the bus stop AFTER it turns off the main road, they do. If the bus doesn’t have to stop every 300 feet, there’s no good reason to. Bus stops shouldn’t be within 300 feet of ANY major intersection, or where oncoming traffic doesn’t have 100 feet or so to see the bus and stop.
Yeah, kids can walk a little. It doesn’t kill them. I don’t know the stat right off the top of my head, but the vast majority of kids molested are hurt by someone they know. Not by Stranger Danger.
Leaffan - that depends a lot on if the kids regularly are late, or if it’s a rarity, and where they are. On a main road, no the driver probably won’t or can’t wait. if the kids are ALWAYS on time, and this one time mom waves, most drivers will hang on a bit of they can. Bus drivers get to know their kids, the families and the routines.
We have a guy in a green pickup truck who’s been cruising Decatur’s school bus stops for at least 10 years now. “The thick of predators” would include walking past him, wherever and whoever he is.
And alerting parents whenever a registered sex offender moves into their neighborhood doesn’t do any good if the guy (A) isn’t a registered sex offender, and/or (B) doesn’t live in your neighborhood. Decatur has 90,000 people; he could be anywhere.
I’m not saying it’s intrinsically bad for K-5 children to have to walk longer than a block to get to a bus stop–I’m saying it’s intrinsically bad to expect them to walk long distances through busy urban areas full of strangers, none of whom will be watching out for them, and some of whom, at least, may be predators happy to take advantage of the opportunity that randomly falls into their lap when Johnny walks past on his long trek to school.
It’s a big deal to Niedhart, who, if he misses his connecting bus, has to wait an additional 30-40 minutes. Did you read the OP? Maybe on a residential street with no traffic behind you, it’s no big deal to wait. But on a thoroughfare large enough to have a city bus on it? And when you can see in your rearview that you’re holding up traffic?
I’m not familiar with Decatur, and your posts don’t indicate it, but are the majority (or even a number of) kids taking the bus having to transit through busy urban areas?
There’s the same guy in the same green pickup truck that’s been crusing bus stops for ten years, and no one - no police department - has done anything about it? No parent or group of parents has confronted or found a reason or a way to stop this guy?
Off subject a bit, but the spooky guy cruising the streets for strangers to abduct and molest, while an awful thing - is nowhere near…I don’t know the word I want here…“common” enough that society needs to completely arrange ANY social/community around the possibility. Yeah, bad people are there, but to have a school bus stop every few hundred feet so that no child is ever out of sight of their home is severe overkill.
On a regular basis -oh hell - probably a few times a month, I get calls from parents who tell me I have to move their kids bus stop so that mom can see it from the front window. I know most of transportation directors, a good number of contract bus managers, and school district business administrators in the Chicago area. I bused kids in Chicago for three years - 275 buses running through the some of the scariest neighborhoods in the city, and never - EVER have I heard anyone justify moving a stop for that reason alone.
The ISBE state transportation director is on my speed dial, her and I have had this very conversation a couple times with others. Barring a specific safety concern, the responsibility is to make the service safe, reasonably accessible and efficient. Stopping every few hundred feet screws up neighborhood traffic, costs time, fuel and money.
Where we do have predators, or yes - even just neighborhood creeps that aren’t registered, that live in a neighborhood where we have buses run, we will arrange kids and bus stops so that they don’t have to walk PAST that house. That’s reasonable. I even have a bus running in a neighborhood that’s not technically eligible for a bus to their school, picking up kids because there’s some guy that likes to stand naked in the window. According to everyone - cops, his mom, his doctor (he’s mentally handicapped) the guy’s harmless. But he’s creepy so we keep the kids away.
So, when there’s a reasonable way to keep kids safe, we do it. The funny thing is that I have parents call me to get a bus when they live 3 blocks from school because there’s a registered offender on their block. They don’t want their kids alone out near the guy’s house. Then, when I ride my bike through their neighborhood, where are all the neighborhood kids playing? On the street in front of the guy’s house, with not a parent in sight.
Deciding that the boogeyman is unknown, out there somewhere and stalking your kids relentlessly is just not rational. On top of that, it’s a hell of lesson for kids - that they can’t ever be alone anywhere because nowhere is safe, and someone, somewhere is out to get them.
Kids can walk, they should walk a little, and if parents need for them to not be alone, then walk WITH them, or have a neighbor walk a bunch of kids - I see that all the time. If there’s stranger danger in your neighborhood, ID the guy and pressure someone to do something. I know Decataur has some rough areas - my kid’s boyfriend lives there, I’ve been there. But the answer isn’t to make school bus into a taxi.
Off my soapbox for now. I think.
Yup. Nope.
[ul][li] By the time the kids get around to reporting that a man tried to get them into his truck, he’s long gone. [/li][li] Decatur is a big place, physically. Sprawled out on both sides of Lake Decatur, plus up into Forsyth and down into Mount Zion. Decatur School District 61 involves two high schools, two middle schools, five magnet schools if you count Hope Academy, and 11 elementary schools. That’s a lot of bus stops, with a lot of little kids standing there. Lots of room for him to disappear into. It’s not like Blue Mound or Boody, where everybody knows everybody else’s car, and a stranger’s truck would stand out.[/li][li] Lots of green trucks out there. You can’t question everybody in the world who owns a green truck, there are privacy issues.[/li][li] It doesn’t happen often enough for the community as a whole to get up in arms; just every so often, it pops up on the local news radar, briefly. It’s not like he has a regular route; he’s just…sporadic.[/li][li] He’s never actually succeeded in abducting anyone so far, no disappearances followed by tiny mutilated bodies turning up. Thus, the collective shrug.[/li][li] There’s a limit to how long you can stay at Red Alert. Witness post-9/11. So the short blurb appears on page 2, the word comes down the grapevine, parents warn their kids, and time passes and nothing else happens, so everyone stands down.[/li][li] TPTB are extremely defensive about “what a nice place Decatur is”. Witness our new city motto: “We like it here.” They are not anxious to see themselves on CNN or Fox as the locus of a predator in a green truck. Thus, Bad News gets downplayed, fast, lest some AP stringer pick up on it.[/ul][/li]
I’m sorry but this is an overly simplistic view of the situation. For starters, neighborhoods are transient anymore, nobody even knows who their neighbors are, let alone knows which ones represent “stranger danger”. The vast majority of homes in my 1920s bungalows working-class neighborhood are rental properties. They have revolving doors installed, yanno? I couldn’t keep up with my neighbors if I had a surveillance system and a scorecard.
And, “pressure someone”? Who? The police? The police are extremely reluctant to take any kind of action just because you think a neighbor is “creepy”. He has to do something first, something concrete, and actionable, and THEN they’ll “do something”–perhaps.
And, of course, after he’s finally “done something”, your child may be molested, or dead.
I’d prefer to have the bus pick my kid up at the end of my street, personally.
When you go hiking in the Rocky Mountains, you watch out for grizzlies and cougars. Even though, statistically, hardly anyone is ever attacked by grizzlies and cougars every year, still, you watch out for them–don’t you? And if you’re taking your kids hiking, you make sure that they’re on the same page vis-a-vis “safe behavior in bear/cougar country”.
And by the same token, you teach your children to be aware of the possibility of other kinds of predators, and “safe behavior in their country”. I think that’s perfectly rational. YMMV.
The way to be safe in cougar country is by keeping the thought in the back of your mind that cougars do live there too, and that you are edible. And the way to be safe in urban predator country is by keeping the thought in the back of your mind that urban predators do live there too, and that you are edible. I don’t think that’s irrational, or paranoid. Again, YMMV.
No. The school board has it set up so that if the kids are going to be bussed, the bus stops either right in front of their house, or at the end of their street. Which means that in residential neighborhoods where kids are bussed to school, the bus stops at every street corner.
The ones that have to transit through busy urban areas are the inner-city kids who are enrolled in Durfee Magnet School, because their Near North Side neighborhood is within the 1-1/2 mile limit, so no bus service is provided. So they have to walk, through their inner-city urban area, down four-lane-with-median-strip Grand, residential yet extremely busy main drag connecting east and west Decatur.
Whimp America.
For the first six years of my education I walked to school and back twice a day (we went home for lunch). And yes, it was uphill both ways. Really!
For the second six years of my education I walked to school, and had lunch in school.
For the rest of my education, I walked, rode a city bus, rode my bicycle, cross-country-skied, drove my car and even telecommuted.
Whimp America that kids these days can’t do it on their own as I did.
So, basically, nothing ever happens.
[QUOTE=Duck Duck Goose]
I’d prefer to have the bus pick my kid up at the end of my street, personally.
[/quote
Again, because you’re paranoid and assessing a greater probability to an unlikely danger.
Which seems to be working, because whatever the kids are doing, this guy never seems to be able to get anyone of them into his truck.
Which includes teaching your kids to never ever get into the car of someone they have not been introduced to by their parents. Not by never being out of sight of their mommies.
So, even though above one of your rationales for having the bus stop at every corner - the being in an busy urban area - only applies to those kids. Not your kids. Not the kids on the bus with the one-a-block stops.
Mr Bus Guy put it much better than I can. You realize there’s a big difference between possibility and probability, right?
Can someone please report my post? There was text there when I hit enter. Also the preview post isn’t working.
Done.
Thanks.
Weird. At home there was no text. Here at work, there’s text. Guess I need to have an Exorcism done on my PC at home… Anyone got any garlic or incense?