BY DAVID MAMARIL HOROWITZ

david.horowitz@bgdailynews.com

To comply with a new state law, the city and county school districts are planning to send families of district students updated school bus policies.

Last year’s House Bill 446 mandates that local boards of education adopt a “comprehensive transportation procedure,” Warren County Public Schools Assistant Superintendent Kyle Cassady said. This law “permits districts to revoke transportation privileges for students who fail to follow and comply with the newly documented procedure,” he added.

Signing off on school districts’ respective new procedures is mandated. “Failure to submit written acknowledgement (of the transportation safety policy) by a student or their parent or guardian may be grounds for a revocation of a student’s transportation privileges until the acknowledgement is properly received,” the legislation states.

The Kentucky Department of Education had intended to send guidance to districts to inform their policies ahead of the ongoing school year, but KDE guidance came in fall, said Bowling Green Independent School District Director of Operations Cedric Browning, who oversees transportation.

WCPS stated that it plans to send out the form this month. Parents and guardians whose children use the school bus at any point during the school year will have seven days to sign and return it. Beginning the upcoming school year, WCPS will send it out with the beginning-of-year informational packets distributed to all families across schools, Cassady said.

BGISD is working on a plan for how and when it’ll distribute the new policy for signing, Browning said. For the time being, at least, BGISD doesn’t intend to restrict students from riding if their families don’t sign it due to the delay in receiving guidance from KDE; BGISD intends to require signatures, at latest, at the start of the next school year, Browning said.

The General Assembly passed the law to address disciplinary issues on school buses, according to the Legislative Research Commission.

WCPS has collaborated with the Kentucky Department of Education and Kentucky School Board Association to create the procedure, Cassady said; BGISD has collaborated with the Green River Regional Educational Cooperative to utilize the state guidelines, Browning said.

The WCPS and BGISD boards of education approved these new policies at their meetings in January and February, respectively.

The two policies, for their respective districts, each detail student expectations and rules, consequences for misconduct, driver rights, the responsibilities of parents and guardians, and the violations for the latter if they’re not followed. Each of the two policies outlines how bus drivers can report the misconduct of students, parents or guardians, and each allows bus drivers an opportunity to be heard during proceedings on misconduct that transpire on school buses, Cassady and Browning added about their respective districts.

“We want kids when they’re riding the bus to understand the expectations, and we want our drivers to understand that whether (it’s due to) students, parents or guardians, (if) there are issues or concerns, that we’re going to look into that and investigate it,” Cassady said. “It really comes down to school safety.

“It would be the intent of our schools and our district for all parents to read through this new law, to understand the expectations of riding public transportation with our school system and have a conversation with their children or child, and (make sure) everybody’s on the same page. I think drivers feel that when parents are on board with the expectations, kids are much more likely to comply with the expectations riding to and from school.”

Conduct

BGISD’s new policy outlines rules of conduct specific to school buses, where the bus-specific language gives drivers and other transportation staff support if there are issues on buses, Browning said. The previous policy applied the more general classroom rules to school buses, Browning said.

For example, he noted, the new policy has guidelines for the time students are expected at the bus stops and for staying safe around moving school buses when they’re in motion.

The WCPS document’s stipulations on student expectations, in a nutshell, requires students to obey bus rules — “all proper conduct while riding a bus,” WCPS Director of Transportation Chip Jenkins summed up.

This surrounds the various aspects of riding a school bus, such as arriving at bus stops on a timely basis, seating, noise levels and behavior.

“Riding a school bus is a privilege — it’s no guarantee unless a student meets the expectations from the driver and our school policy,” Cassady said.

The rules on conduct will be in accordance with the district’s code of acceptable behavior and discipline, laid out in the student handbook, Cassady said. WCPS will address misconduct using its districtwide behavior matrix, which is followed when infractions do occur, according to WCPS.

Bus driver involvement

Each of the two districts’ policies bolster existing bus driver rights in cases of serious misconduct where drivers allege a student has committed a violation placing the someone at risk of physical harm or making it unsafe for a driver to transport students, according to the respective districts.

In these cases, drivers at WCPS and BGISD can submit additional documentation that would prompt a direct, immediate response allowing a school’s principal or assistant principal to serve as the primary investigator, according to the respective districts.

The policies each provide up to around five school days/a school week for an investigation, where a student can be pulled off a bus to allow time to investigate, according to the two districts.

If a student is deemed to be doing something very dangerous, then they could be taken off the bus, according to the two districts.

This additional documentation also brings these cases more to the forefront than before, according to both districts.

“We’ve always … investigated things,” Jenkins said about the WCPS policy. “This kind of brings it out on a separate document that (parents and guardians) can see so they know they must sign off on it.”