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Pinellas school officials haven't been honest about safety issues concerning bus stops, and the risks schoolchildren face are finally coming to light.
When 16-year-old Rebecca McKinney of Clearwater died after being hit by a car Oct. 8 while trying to get from her school bus stop to her home across six lanes of heavy traffic, Pinellas school officials acted as if Rebecca's assignment to a dangerous bus stop were a fluke. It must have "fallen through the cracks," they said, because school district policy forbids locating bus stops where students must cross multiple-lane roads.
But the truth came out last week: Rebecca's situation was not unique at all. On Wednesday, school district officials told the Times that 300 bus stops in Pinellas County will be changed because students using those stops had to cross roads more than three lanes wide.
Three hundred stops. The district isn't saying how many children that represents. In fact, district officials aren't saying much of anything now. They are in full defensive mode, funneling comment through a spokesman or their attorney and avoiding detailed questions on an issue that could not be closer to the hearts of parents.
Do they expect parents to just trust that they are responding with appropriate energy after learning that for months or years, the district has disregarded the safety of hundreds, even thousands, of children? Look at how many times, just since Rebecca's death, that the district's explanations have turned out to be untrue or uninformed:
The district treated Rebecca's dangerous school bus stop as an aberration; it wasn't.
The district pointed a finger at Rebecca's bus driver, saying she should have notified a supervisor of the danger. Turns out the drivers of that route and of other similarly dangerous routes had talked to their superiors, but they were often rebuffed.
The district said it had a policy that no child would be assigned to a bus stop that required him to cross a multilane road, but bus drivers and some parents were told by transportation personnel that it was really okay - wink, wink - for high school and even middle school children to cross those forbidden roads.
The district said that the computer program it uses to coordinate and assign bus stops was not able to identify hazardous multilane roads. However, the company that makes the software and other districts that use it say it is easily set up to flag those roads and keep children off of them.
The district said if parents called in to complain about an unsafe bus stop, it was changed. Indignant parents report that's not so - their calls to the district transportation office were not returned or their requests to have a bus stop moved were denied.
This school district just hasn't been honest with parents on this issue. And dishonesty is just one of the problems. Incoming Pinellas school superintendent Clayton Wilcox, who takes over the district Monday, said it best: The school district's transportation office exhibited "callous disregard" toward concerned parents.
We hope Wilcox's blunt words telegraph that he will be tough when he assumes his new post. School district personnel whose job it is to ensure that children get safely to and from school must be held accountable for their failures and replaced by employees who understand the importance of this mission. Children are being hurt and killed on roads where the school district irresponsibly placed them. As Times staff writer Robert Farley reported last week, one of those students, 11-year-old Justin Rose of Clearwater, had to cross six-lane State Road 60 and four-lane Belcher Road in Clearwater to get home from his bus stop - an outrageous situation in which to place a young child. Justin is now recovering from injuries suffered when he was hit by a car Sept. 9 - weeks after school started and his mother began asking the district to change his stop. Last week another Clearwater student was hit crossing four-lane Drew Street. Every school day brings new risks for students riding buses.
School Board members, who have been virtually silent on this issue, also must work with Wilcox to decide whether the design of Pinellas' bus system is too complex to be operated safely with the existing fleet. Under the district's school choice plan, families may choose schools quite distant from their neighborhoods and still get bus service. More than 47,000 students are bused to almost 15,000 stops around the county. Rather than buying all the buses it needed for choice, the school district decided to have buses make multiple runs in order to save money for other education needs.
If the tradeoff is that students must be dropped on crowded arterial roadways and put in harm's way, it isn't worth the risk.