Dear Sir/Madam,
I am writing to express my concerns about the safety of private school bus service. I have a child who takes private school buses to school every day and I could observe that the school bus service operators do not follow proper safety procedures when dealing with young children.
Firstly, the situation on the school bus is chaotic. Children could stand or even walk freely on the school bus while the bus driver is driving. And the children talk to each other loudly, which distracts the driver’s attention. However, as the school bus driver needs to concentrate on driving, he cannot spare time handling the problems and can just turn a blind eye to the misbehavior of the children. Whenever there is a sudden stop of the bus or an accident occurs, the children playing and walking around the bus may be injured seriously.
Besides, the school bus driver allows young children to get off the bus even if their parents or guardians are not at the drop-off area. I have witnessed a few times that young kids needed to wait fortheir guardians at the drop-off area alone. This may pose danger to the young children because we can never tell what will happen to them during the waiting period. For example, they may meet some bad people who may harm them.
From my point of view, the school bus service operators should shoulder the responsibility for ensuring the safety of children who take the school buses. Also, the safety of children is not something to be taken lightly. But the above situations would erode parents’ confidence in the private school bus service operators. As a result, improvements should be made so as to remedy the situations.
In the first place, there should be a school bus nanny on every private school bus. Then, the nanny could help the young children to get on or get off from the school bus safely.
And at the same time, the nannies should be trained to take care of children on the buses. They should not allow children to walk or play around while the bus is moving. And they should ask the children to lower their voice in order to minimize the distraction posed to the drivers.
Also, the driver and the nanny need to make sure there are adults to receivethe young children at the drop-off area before they let the child get off the school bus. If their parents or guardians do not arrive at the station within 10 minutes, the driver needs to bring the children back to school, asking teachers to contact the children’s parents. This can make sure the young children are safe.
To conclude, there is room for improvement for the private school bus operators in dealing with young children. Only by implementing the above three measures can the situation be improved and the confidence of parents in the school bus service operators can be rebuilt.