School Buses

Forty-four Anne Arundel County school buses were vandalized over the Memorial Day weekend, affecting service for at least 2,000 students yesterday morning, a county schools spokeswoman said. Tires were deflated on buses parked at two lots in Annapolis, one off Riva Road, said Maneka Wade, the schools spokeswoman, the other off Chinquapin Round Road. All of the buses were repaired by 10:45 a.m., Wade said, and service resumed its normal afternoon schedule. Annapolis and Anne Arundel County police are investigating the vandalism.

SCHOOLS ARE OPEN, so the usual hassles over school buses have begun.One parent wants her child to ride the bus even though the home is just inside a one-mile radius of the school, technically putting her home in the walking zone.Another worries that children riding school buses should be wearing seat belts -- to reinforce the message to youngsters about buckling up as much as to better protect them in a possible mishap.Other parents complained that children were forced to stand in the aisles of buses during the first two weeks of school.

At Pam Howard's breakfast table, her son, Joshua, can look out the window and see Northwest Middle School, where he is a pupil. Out the kitchen door, he can see Taneytown Elementary School.The schools are about 200 feet away, but Joshua and the other children in his Courier Drive neighborhood, such as Ted Parrish, a fifth-grader, are supposed to ride a bus rather than cross busy Kings Drive, which runs in front of both schools.Their parents would rather have a crossing guard help them cross, and they asked the City Council to hire one. Council members indicated they would approve the request.

In her young life, it is doubtful that Erika Dennis traveled anywhere without being strapped tightly into a car seat or buckled securely by a seat belt.That is, until she went off to second grade at Howard County's Atholton Elementary on a school bus this week. It rumbled away with 7-year-old Erika perched on a beltless seat as her grandmother waved goodbye from the curb.After years of debate and a string of fatal school bus accidents around the country, the National Transportation Safety Board plans to release the results of a bus crashworthiness investigation later this month.

WASHINGTON -- The National Transportation Safety Board decided yesterday against recommending seat belts on school buses but called for tough new safety standards and urged that school buses and tour buses carry airline-style "black boxes" to help investigators understand accidents better.The board also urged governors to set up a uniform reporting system on bus accidents and asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to collect data on passenger injuries.The board's report followed a three-year investigation into bus accidents nationally -- including a fatal crash two years ago in Easton.

Mary Gemmill has nothing against Friendship Valley Elementary for changing school hours for next year. She just wishes she had known about it sooner -- perhaps before she built her work schedule around when she thought her two children would be getting home.Beginning this fall, a school day at Friendship Valley will begin at 8 a.m. and end at 2: 15 p.m. The schedule is being moved up an hour from last year. While that decision was made in May, most parents have received no word of it.A handful who found out by word of mouth are complaining.

WASHINGTON -- The National Transportation Safety Board decided yesterday against recommending seat belts on school buses but called for tough new safety standards and urged that school buses and tour buses carry airline-style "black boxes" to help investigators understand accidents better.The board also urged governors to set up a uniform reporting system on bus accidents and asked the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) to collect data on passenger injuries.The board's report followed a three-year investigation into bus accidents nationally -- including a fatal crash two years ago in Easton.

Parents in the Cattail Woods neighborhood thought they had a simple, common-sense request: Let the bus driver who takes their children to Lisbon Elementary School drive around a loop instead of performing a three-point turn to exit the neighborhood.Stopping and backing up at Brittle Branch Way and Cattail Meadows Drive in Lisbon seems dangerous to the parents -- especially with dads, moms, their cars and their preschool children taking up space at the bus stop. So they asked the Howard County school system's transportation office to permit the driver to loop around Cattail Meadows Drive back to Brittle Branch, something she wanted to do.But transportation officials said no. The school board upheld that decision at the end of last month.

When more than 40,000 Howard County students stream into parking lots and across crosswalks for their first day of class Monday, police will be using radar guns and watching for reckless drivers nearby.At a news conference yesterday, police and county officials announced plans to beef up patrols near 14 schools each day, covering all 65 schools over a two-week period. The roving officers will be looking for drivers speeding through school zones or zipping around school buses."We have kids who have never been to school before," said Pfc. Paul Yodzis, a traffic officer.

State troopers, looking to remind motorists about Maryland school bus laws, plan to ride shotgun on randomly selected buses in Carroll County next week.With more than 21,000 county students riding buses twice daily, the potential for tragedy is too great to be complacent, school transportation officials and troopers from the Westminster barracks said yesterday.The police effort was announced at Friendship Valley Elementary yesterday to publicize National School Bus Safety Week, Oct. 19-23.

Fifteen Anne Arundel County school bus routes were delayed Monday morning after the discovery that several school buses were damaged by apparent vandalism, police and school officials said. Police were dispatched to the 1400 block of Odenton Road, a lot where school buses are parked, and found that the electrical lines of 14 buses had been cut, said Justin Mulcahy, a police spokesman. "The buses were all inoperable," said Mulcahy. "It looks like the electrical lines were cut, unfortunately."

Thomas E. "Bear" D'Antoni, a former Catonsville resident who drove trucks and school buses for 50 years, died of renal failure Tuesday at a nursing home in Jefferson City, Tenn. He was 91. Born and raised in East Baltimore, Mr. D'Antoni attended parochial schools but left school to help support his family. "He was 15 when he first began driving trucks," said a son, Robert D'Antoni of Bel Air. Mr. D'Antoni drove for the Mushroom Express Co. and for many years for Johnson Motor Lines. After the company went out of business, he drove school buses for the Shaw Bus Co., until retiring in the late 1980s.

Lelia T. Allen choked up during the state school board meeting this week when she remembered how, as a child growing up in North Carolina in the 1940s, the school buses would pass her by. So she walked - three miles, as the occupants of those buses threw things at her - determined not to be denied an education. "There were no buses for black children," Allen told me after Tuesday's meeting, her eyes still moist after she voted to uphold a new high school graduation requirement despite fears that it would result in disproportionate numbers of African-American and Hispanic students being denied diplomas.

Forty-four Anne Arundel County school buses were vandalized over the Memorial Day weekend, affecting service for at least 2,000 students yesterday morning, a county schools spokeswoman said. Tires were deflated on buses parked at two lots in Annapolis, one off Riva Road, said Maneka Wade, the schools spokeswoman, the other off Chinquapin Round Road. All of the buses were repaired by 10:45 a.m., Wade said, and service resumed its normal afternoon schedule. Annapolis and Anne Arundel County police are investigating the vandalism.

THE ISSUE: -- County Executive Ken Ulman clearly has a "green" agenda, having proposed nine environmental items in his first budget. What do you think of Ulman's approach? Hands off my wallet County Executive Ken Ulman certainly has a "green" agenda, but not in the way many interpret it. No, it didn't take Ulman long to start looking for more "green" from the taxpayers to fund his irresponsible choices. Ulman wants to raise the fire tax, used to finance fire operations only until Ulman gained control, to "reduce fire insurance rates for western county residents."

The deaths of four teen-agers in Monday's horrifying Alabama school bus crash is likely to renew the debate over whether school buses should be equipped with safety belts. A recent study found that school bus-related accidents injure 17,000 U.S. children each year. That's double previous estimates that were based solely on crash data. Most of the injuries are not life threatening, but require trips to emergency rooms. Safety advocates suspect many of these injuries might be prevented if buses were required to have 3-point shoulder and belt restraints.

Testimony that the alleged Washington-area snipers had plans to shoot and bomb school buses and other targets in Baltimore, had they not been caught, prompted a ripple of emotions around the area yesterday. "When I heard the news, it was very alarming to me because we are all about safety," said Tony Bennett, who manages operations for two First Student Inc. lots from which school buses are dispatched to carry students in the city and Baltimore and Howard counties. "It's very troubling."

Drivers for the city school system's largest bus contractor - as well as the parents of some children who ride the firm's buses - charge the company is operating unsafe vehicles and providing inadequate training and shoddy maintenance. Baltimore schools officials and representatives of the company, First Student Inc., insist the buses are safe, attributing the complaints to an effort by the Teamsters union to organize drivers. They say they have enough confidence in First Student to recently approve a $5.7 million contract with the company for next school year.

Judging by the comments I've received over the years, I'm beginning to believe there is nothing we drivers love to hate more than those lumbering yellow school buses. We particularly hate it when the bus drivers to whom we entrust our children flout the laws written to keep our children safe. "I was going down Montgomery Road [recently] and came upon a stopped school bus (headed northbound), red lights flashing at Lynn Lane (across from Hunting Horn). There were several cars stopped on both sides of Montgomery.

The failure to evacuate New Orleans' most vulnerable residents before Hurricane Katrina struck is causing city leaders nationwide to rethink plans for the mass movement of people unable to escape on their own in a catastrophe. Like many cities, New Orleans had such an evacuation plan. City officials knew that approximately 100,000 city residents had no personal transportation, and their intent was to use public buses to ferry them to safety. It was a plan filled with flaws, and New Orleans officials knew it. A test of the plan last summer during a simulated Category 3 hurricane revealed that as many as 300,000 people might remain trapped in the city, many for lack of private transportation, according to a report by Louisiana State University.