Sydney Denekamp | Staff Intern
National bus safety week is Oct., 19-23 and was created to bring awareness and express the importance of school bus safety. In addition to their regular safety guidelines, both Tri-Valley School district and West Central School district have been implementing new safety measures to ensure the health of students and drivers during the pandemic.
Both districts have a host of new sanitizing procedures due to COVID-19. This includes disinfecting buses multiple times per day, offering hand sanitizers, wearing masks, checking temperatures, seating students with siblings, and trying to spread students out as much as possible.
“I think Tri-Valley is doing an excellent job protecting its drivers and students,” said Tri-Valley bus driver, Kari Carroll.
On top of the normal sanitary precautions, Tri-Valley’s busing service, Foreman Busing, also tries to keep seats around bus drivers empty, opens windows for ventilation and has hired additional bus monitors in an effort to keep the community healthy.
While busier buses already had bus monitors, the district has hired more teaching assistants and parents so that every bus now has a monitor. These monitors ensure every child has their temperature taken before they get on the bus, uses hand sanitizers and wears their mask throughout the bus ride.
The Tri-Valley district has also gone to four-day school weeks which allows for deep cleaning of the buses each Friday.
So far this year, the West Central school district has highly recommended that students wear masks on the bus. However, Wednesday Oct. 13, the district entered phase 2 of their COVID-19 safety plan and will be requiring students to wear masks at activities and on buses.
“The key is being flexible,” Transportation Director, Rick Coker, said about moving back and forth between levels of severity in COVID-19 prevention.
West Central has been utilizing contact tracing to avoid spreading COVID-19 on buses and around the school. So far, four West Central bus drivers have been in quarantine at some point this year.
Coker said that while all of his drivers have expressed concern about becoming infected, they also feel protected by the safety measures being put in place. “It’s really all we can do,” Coker said.
Sherry Rosh, the manager of Foreman Busing, said only one of the bus drivers for Tri-Valley has tested positive for the virus, and that the case was very early on. Per guidelines, the driver quarantined for ten days before returning to work.
Rosh did not know of any student who had contracted the virus through riding the bus. If a student were to get sick, the bus they rode would be taken out of commission for 24 to 48 hours to be deep cleaned.
“I commend my drivers and monitors for doing a great job,” Rosh said.
Carroll, with the Tri-Valley school district, said the hardest part of being a bus driver during the pandemic is trying to maintain relationships with her passengers, especially the youngest ones.
“They don’t get to see that smile – that’s the worst part,” Carroll said. She expressed it was difficult to establish a relationship with the kindergarteners without full facial expressions.
Coker shared the same grievance. He pointed out how a student will often have the same bus driver for many years as well as how the relationship between driver and student is difficult to maintain under the health and safety guidelines.
As for the future, no one seems to know when busing will be able to return to normal, but both districts explained they will continue to do their best to keep students and drivers safe while on the bus.