START offers school bus training to local school districts
Local bus drivers listen to John Zippay, START program coordinator, as he discusses proper deescalation techniques. The START training was offered to school bus drivers from West Holmes, East Holmes and Loudonville school districts.
Over the past many years, schools across the nation have buckled down on security measures as dangerous scenarios continue to rise and the threat of active shooters and other stress-inducing situations can take place, even among the students themselves.
While the nation continues to focus on the schools, one group has thrown its effort into creating instructions on another aspect of the school system that has gone largely unspoken, that being dangers on the school bus.
With National School Bus Safety Week taking place Oct. 21-25, it was the ideal time for area school districts to unite and join the team from School Transportation Active Threat Response Training in exploring proper procedures in deescalating dangerous situations on the school bus through a day-long training session on Friday, Oct. 18 at West Holmes High School.
Bus drivers from school districts in West Holmes, East Holmes and Loudonville sat down to glean from the expertise of the START team, with an eye on educating drivers on how to handle a number of different scenarios.
While it might be easy to focus on the horrifying prospect of an active shooter climbing on board a school bus filled with innocent children, a much more common problem is dealing with an angry parent bringing their problems on board during a bus route.
Considering many students’ days begin and end on the big yellow vehicles, it makes sense to invest time and knowledge into helping drivers learn best practices when it comes to dealing with pressure situations.
Helping drivers better understand how to deal with crises and hostile engagements, whether that is listening to the laments of an enraged parent or understanding how to deal with unruly children, the program focuses on teaching simple but effective procedures.
John Zippay, START program coordinator, said they have made 27 program presentations already this school year, and they have received tremendous feedback.
“This is all information that’s new, but it’s something we feel drivers have wanted for some time,” Zippay said. “We are advocates for the drivers, especially when it comes to preparedness and active threats. So much emphasis has been put on the school buildings in recent years, but districts tend to forget about the school bus.”
West Holmes School District transportation coordinator Coreena Johnson said taking the front seat on a school bus and picking up and delivering the district’s most precious cargo every day is a joyful yet demanding job, filled with plenty of pressure.
“Driving bus is not an easy job. It can be very stressful at times, often filled with challenging and stressful situations sometimes,” Johnson said. “I think the value of this in-service meeting with START is giving our drivers the tools they need to deescalate these situations.”
Johnson said she continually hears from her drivers about their struggles throughout each day, and they express their concerns and thoughts about how to best handle situations.
The day’s events began inside the high school, where the drivers met with START officials who talked about threat awareness, techniques and safety habits, emergency response basics, and crisis intervention, followed by offering videos of several real-life national scenarios in which bus drivers had to make important safety decisions where life-threatening instances took place.
While much of the day focused on these life-threatening topics, the team also explored how to deal with unruly students, addressing bullying, recognizing bad behavior, dealing with hostile parents, and evacuation processes and lockdowns.
One of the START team members, Clifford Kime, a retired Cleveland police officer, said the premise of their role is to create scenarios that enlighten school districts as to the possible dangers that lurk for bus drivers, both the seemingly insignificant and the life-threatening ones.
He said buses are basically mobile school settings where children must be safe and districts must be prepared for all outcomes and circumstances.
“A bus is basically a tube as opposed to walking into a school, and it’s a difficult place to control,” Kime said. “Our aim is to save lives and teach drivers the tools to feel confident in the decisions they make in deescalating possible dangerous situations. We want to offer the guidelines for them to deal with many different scenarios and keep them in control of their bus.”
While Zippay took drivers through a series of scenarios in the bus garage, START team instructors Todd Dietzel and Nick Kline took a second group into the parking lot by the football stadium, where they provided training activities into actual techniques to use on routes.
“If we react when it happens, it’s too late,” Kime said. “Up until now nobody has really engaged in this type of dramatic role on a school bus, but we need to be prepared. We don’t want districts to come back later and ask what they could have done.”
He said START continues to find innovative ways to stay ahead of the curve in the bus scenario, and the hope is more districts will invest the time in learning how to properly deal with any situation, big or small.
“The most important thing is getting kids to school and home safely,” Zippay said.
For more information visit START at www.school busstart.com.