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Here is how it needs to work.
A parent calls the Pinellas County schools and says: "You're making my kid cross several lanes of traffic to get to and from the bus stop."
An alarm goes off or something. A big red light starts flashing in the school bus office. The school bus person says: "That is an emergency! It will be fixed RIGHT NOW."
And then they fix it. That hour. If all else fails, then the next day the incoming superintendent of schools, Clayton Wilcox, personally shows up to drive that kid to school.
Or if Wilcox's car is already full, then members of the School Board help out. Or several of the various administrators.
Yes, they all have important meetings to attend, and they all have important memos to write. But maybe the idea of not getting kids killed might be, you know, more important.
Maybe.
Unfortunately, that was not the case for Rebecca McKinney, a 16-year-old junior at Clearwater High School who was struck Friday as she and her sister scampered across McMullen-Booth Road. She died Sunday.
Rebecca McKinney's case is not unique. The anecdotal evidence now coming in from other parents is that they have tried, even begged, the school system not to make their kids cross busy highways.
I talked to the father of another Clearwater High student, Gary Williams. Last year his daughter Ashley, then a junior, had to cross busy, dangerous U.S. 19 to get to her bus stop.
"They put her in a position where she had to cross seven lanes," Williams told me. Even if she ran, the stoplight was too short.
He called the school system.
They said they would fix it.
She had to cross U.S. 19 the next day.
He called again. They said they would fix it.
She had to cross U.S. 19 the third day.
He called a third time. They told him: "Well, that's where the bus stop is." He did not allow her to ride the bus again.
It sounds very much like the response that the schools gave to McKinney's mother, according to a family friend: "It is where it is."
In 2002, our reporters wrote about six children assigned to Anona Elementary School on Indian Rocks Road. They included a 7-year-old first-grader who had to brave traffic without a stop light or stop sign. The school district refused to alter the bus route by one block. A mother said she was told she should "educate her child on how to cross the street."
Here is what the Pinellas school system's spokesman and career apologist, Ron Stone, said on Monday about the death: There had been no reports of any complaints from McKinney's mother this year.
No reports.
Let us parse that statement into its several levels.
First: It implies it's the mom's fault for not saying anything. (The family says she's been complaining for years.)
Second: What, they need a complaint first, before they can decide not to jettison kids from school buses into heavy traffic?
Third: What kind of report? Form 29-B, "Request Not To Endanger My Daughter," filled out in triplicate?
By Tuesday, school officials appeared to be trying out a new strategy: Offer Up the Bus Driver. The idea was that some poor, underpaid sucker suddenly could be responsible for setting and enforcing transportation policy for the School Board. Case solved!
Oh, and there also is the computer excuse. The School Board's computers can't tell four-lane roads from any others when they draw the bus routes. In this day and age of GPS and MapQuest and new technological miracles every day, the School Board can't tell McMullen-Booth Road from the alley behind my house. What, were the hamsters in the little wheels tired? Did the 386 computers break down? Maybe they should've stuck with the Macintoshes that they decided to get rid of.
Today, the Pinellas school district searches desperately for somebody else to blame, whether it be parent or bus driver or computer, while assuring the public that it is double-checking how many other students are so endangered. School Board member Mary Russell urged parents in this situation to "please call the district so it'll stop."
It doesn't work.