The Bus Driver
15 Years Experience
South, ..
Female, 37
I have been a bus driver since late 2006. I know the inside story, the scoop, the down low dirt of what it takes to be a bus driver, how to handle kids and adults, and how to survive on the "streets" so to speak. I used to have a blog, feel free to browse it or ask me a question here.
Being shorthanded is a tough subject as many bus shops everywhere are short drivers. Typically though whether or not SPED buses have monitors on them is based by state. I would research the laws in Virginia and see if not having a monitor is illegal on your bus. If it is, then I would make efforts to report the activity to the appropriate authorities. If SPED buses are not required to have monitors on them, then my suggestion is to do the best you can with the resources you have.
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It varies from state to state, but in my district, the cameras are designed to keep running approximately 10 minutes after the bus has been turned off. This is for safety reasons for the driver and for the kids. It also provides enough time for the bus driver to walk the bus/sweep the bus at the end of the route. This also is proof that the driver is doing their job by walking the bus and prevents the driver from getting in a compromising situation should a student be found on the bus after the route and the bus has been shut off.
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You said it yourself. You should not have been standing up in the first place. Did your bus driver warn you about standing up while the bus was moving? You also assume it was a brake check, but maybe he really did see an obstacle in the road that would have required quick decisive action. As for the legality of it, technically no. If the driver can be proved to have illegally "brake checked" the bus in order to get a student to sit down, then there can be trouble. That being said:
SIT DOWN!
As for your question - could it have waited until you got off at your stop? Could it have waited until the bus driver was NOT driving, but instead sitting at your school? Ask yourself these questions.
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Well first, you did a good thing by calling the secretary of your school. The thing I would recommend would be calling the bus shop secretary and see if it has been turned in there. If the bus is the same, then you can look in the seat you were sitting in, and hopefully the game will still be there. However, a likely outcome is that someone else picked up your video game and has not turned it in. I'm sad to say that many students are not honest and you have probably lost the game. I hope you are able to recover it and get it back. Good luck!
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Personally, I like assigning seats because then each child knows they have a place to sit. A downside to assigned seats is having random children that do not normally ride the route get on a bus with a pass because they are going home with a friend/cousin/to grandmas. In my experience as a substitute, the drivers who have assigned seats on their buses tend to have calmer buses overall. The kids are less likely to act up and the ones that try to are quickly ratted out by other students who enjoy following the rules. Bus drivers do have the right to assign seats, and if I am on a bus and experiencing problems, I will assign seats to the children the day that I drive. It can cause problems with parents, but if I know where their kid sits, there is no fighting whether their kid misbehaved because their child sits in the same seat every day.
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Honestly, if anything, I feel that the bullying problem seems to have gotten worse or at least more apparent. There are alot of anti-bullying media campaigns out there because there is an increased awareness of the problem. The issue now is more the bullies who blatantly bully in plain sight. Bullying can take many forms, some obvious, and some very subtle. The thing that has to happen in order for the bullying problem to decrease is for the consequence for bullying be something that the bullies actively dislike. If they don't like the consequence, they will not bully as much. The problem we have in school is that the consequences really have no effect on students that bully. For a student who is a good student, rarely gets into trouble, a lunch detention or losing their recess is a big thing and enough of a deterrent to have them avoid getting into trouble because that student's parents are often active within the school and actively take part in their child's education. If that student faces a consequence for misbehavior at school, it is likely that the same student will face similar consequences at home to show the student that the behavior in question will not be tolerated. A bully or someone who is constantly in trouble for other reasons, really doesn't care much about the school consequence because when they get home, the parents may be absent or simply not care to follow it up at home.
Thats not to say that there are exceptions to that assumption, but those children who lack discipline at home will invariably be in trouble at school for misbehavior. Some parents believe it is the school systems job to raise their child to be an upstanding citizen.
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I don't know if it is against the law per-say, however there have been a few times where I have needed to use a restroom. The ideal location would be on school property where I could run in and out really quickly. The main concern when a bus driver needs to use the restroom is the supervision of the children on the bus. In the cases that I needed to use a bathroom, I asked a fellow bus driver or an administrator to watch the bus while I ran inside to the school to use the bathroom. In all instances, the time spent off the bus was less than 5 minutes, just long enough to relieve myself.
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