The dust has settled from the start of school, and your staff is finally in their daily mode. Hopefully, you have had the time to answer all of the parent phone calls and clear up any lingering paperwork that piled up on your desk during the first few weeks of the back-to-school grind.

Now your thoughts can turn to some of the tasks that all of us put off until we have more time to handle them, one of which is professional development for your staff.

School transportation operations can present unique challenges when it comes to training staff. Our operations basically have to do the same tasks the right way, day in and day out — often with very little need for change or very little innovation. After all, stopping to load or discharge a child is a fairly straightforward process where ensuring safety and success lies in not deviating from accepted or required procedures.

If so much of the success of our operations lies in doing things the same, how do we create training situations and lesson plans that can keep the interest of even our most seasoned employees who have been there and done that?

To keep things interesting and educational at the same time, we as directors and supervisors have to reach into areas that our staff may not have a great deal of day-to-day exposure to.

Most states have required training programs for school bus drivers that regularly focus on the important aspects of transporting children. This means that in most cases you have the freedom to develop or expand upon training for situations that are necessary but often overlooked or not covered nearly as much as they should be.

If you are thinking at this point, “I don’t have a ton of extra time or cash in my budget to get creative,” don’t rule fun training lessons out. Developing creative training situations does not take a great deal of time or money and in most cases can be done with items or equipment you already have around your facility or your school district.

So if you are wracking your brain for some new and fun ways to train your staff, read on.

Transportation fleet review
In most districts or contractor operations, drivers — except for substitutes or the lowest drivers on the seniority totem pole — drive the same vehicle every day. That is, until they show up for work and their bus is in the shop or until they are taking the football team 40 miles away to the big Friday night game.

If your fleet is not made up of identical vehicles, chances are that many of your drivers may be driving a bus once in a great while without proper time to familiarize themselves with the vehicle, and that presents a training gap and a huge training opportunity.

A transportation fleet review can be a two to 10 hour training program where you select one of each type of vehicle configuration in your current fleet and have a training session built around that vehicle.

The mechanics can walk participating drivers through a pre-trip that highlights the key characteristics of the vehicle and reviews mirror placement, locations of switches and how accessories work.

The class is then provided the opportunity to drive — under the supervision of a driver trainer — the vehicles they normally never drive. So if they end up unexpectedly getting handed the keys to a different bus in a few weeks, they’re likely to have a better knowledge of the vehicle before heading out on the road.

New-bus drive event
Along the same line as the fleet review training session, a session can be built around your annual delivery of new buses.

Even if you do your best to purchase standardized buses, there are going to be little differences from model year to model year that you should familiarize your staff with. You can use the exact same lesson plan reviewed above, but you can have more fun by setting up a roadeo course with cones and have your drivers maneuver the new buses through the serpentine, alley dock, offset and other roadeo configurations.

Smoke-filled bus
If you have an hour and the weather is good enough to get outside, the smoke-filled bus can be a training session that opens some of your drivers’ eyes to some emergency evacuation issues they may have never considered.

The smoke-filled bus is a training tool that is created by using a standard, non-toxic smoke machine — like those used for parties or haunted houses — to create an environment similar to a fire-and-smoke situation on a bus — minus the flames, heat and danger.

The smoke machines can be readily obtained at a party supply store. Or contact a local music store that supplies gear to DJs or bands, and chances are that they can point you in the right direction. Your local fire department may also have one it can loan you.

Your session can start with a short video on fire extinguisher use or safe evacuation techniques. Then your drivers and monitors can proceed outside to enter the smoke-filled bus to locate and remove stuffed training mannequins to simulate students.

Of course, the smoke is not choke-inducing like smoke from real fire, and temperature is not an issue. However, it puts your drivers in touch with the lack of visibility, and possibly their own fears, and allows you to discuss and manage this in a controlled environment.

To make this session really hit home or to add credibility, you can invite one of your local firefighters or fire chiefs to participate as a guest speaker.

Special note: Make sure you have trainers to serve as spotters or safety supervisors so no participants get hurt or panic while inside the smoke-filled bus. This will be an area of reduced or no visibility.

Field trip planning and prep
How often do you find yourself looking up directions for your drivers when they are going to trip locations they have never been to before?

A field trip class can be an excellent team-building activity, a resource you can continue to build on year after year, and a way to improve safety.

I want to be clear that our drivers are professional and skilled in any environment; however, the chance of getting lost and backtracking — or, even worse, having a fender bender while trying to turn around after missing an entrance to a football field or museum — definitely goes up when your drivers are out of their regular area.

This field trip planning workshop can be done over a series of sessions. The first session is spent identifying trip locations that your buses travel to. The next step is to gather as much information about the trip location as possible, such as maps, actual street address, a picture or two from the location’s Website if they have one, and some local information, such as restaurants that can handle buses, tolls, parking fees, etc.

You can divide your drivers into small work groups to do this at the garage during the class, or you can assign these tasks for homework.

The next class session would involve these small groups actually driving out to the field trip site and verifying their information, adding other items such as low clearances, hours, contact names and phones numbers for the trip location, and other local concerns. All of these data are then typed onto a full page trip sheet that can be laminated and used by other drivers for future trips.

As someone who has personally conducted a workshop like this in a school district, trust me when I tell you the drivers will have a great time doing this and learn a great deal at the same time.

A mile in their shoes
Every so often, I will have a bus monitor stop in my office and comment that a new substitute driver does not have the “soft touch” required on the brakes, acceleration or turns to be a special-needs or wheelchair bus driver. This is often because they are still getting used to the vehicle, but sometimes it is because they may not be giving much thought to their special passengers because they are so focused on traffic and reading their route sheet.

The “Ride a Mile in My Shoes” training activity can teach your drivers and monitors, if only for a few hours, what it might be like to be a student with special needs riding on a bus.

For this training session, you would start in your drivers room or training room and do some classroom preparation about types of disabilities and the special features of your wheelchair buses.

After the classroom session, your drivers and monitors, acting as students, board the bus to take a ride. But it is not that simple. Some of your drivers will be riding in wheelchairs you may have at your department or may borrow from your district’s special-needs department or nurse’s office. Some drivers may be wearing sunglasses that are blacked out to limit sight, and others may have to wear slings on each arm to simulate being disabled and deal with their backpack or walking cane.

After boarding the bus, riding around for an hour or so and then exiting the bus — all with their simulated disabilities — your staff can engage in conversation about how they felt, what they have learned and how they may change how they drive special-needs routes in the future.

Hopefully, they will have a new understanding of the type of services they are expected to provide special-needs students and the type of “soft as possible” ride they should be striving to provide.

Drivers become students
Many transportation departments conduct bus safety training for classroom students. The goal of this training is to ensure that your district’s K-5 students understand proper bus safety, behavior, crossing techniques and other important topics. But when was the last time your drivers actually saw what your safety team was teaching your kids?

This special training session actually puts your drivers and monitors in the students’ shoes. Your safety team can have your drivers sit on the floor just like the children do, view the same videos, hear the lessons and review the same handouts.

If your team routinely takes children out to see the bus or practice crossing during their school visits, then your adult “kids” should do the same.

This training activity can close the gap between what your students know and what your drivers know when it comes to classroom safety training. After completing this session, your drivers and monitors can continue to reinforce the lessons taught by your classroom team with the children on their bus because your drivers have heard the same message as the students.

This also provides a great opportunity for your classroom safety team to hone their speaking and presentation skills in front of a group of adults.

Accident scene management
Often times a driver has to learn how to handle an accident when he or she becomes involved in one. This training activity involves setting up a simulated accident between a car and a bus in the safety of your bus garage lot.

To keep things simple, affordable and manageable, I wouldn’t recommend recruiting a bunch of kids to act in the simulation. The purpose of this session is more to walk your staff through the important steps of managing an accident without the distractions caused by kids or other motorists.

You start with a short classroom session on accident scene management and follow it with a hands-on session. From making the first radio call to gathering simulated scene data, developing a seating chart of passengers, exchanging information and filling out sample accident forms, this session may give your drivers just the right practice they need to manage an incident calmly and professionally if one happens to them on the road.

You can make this session even more memorable by having your drivers set up triangles and practice using seat belt cutters and fire blankets. Seat belts that can be used for cutter training are readily available at any automotive junk or wrecking yard.

This session also provides an excellent time to practice manually lowering a wheelchair lift as well.

You may be surprised what your staff knows — and what they don’t know — when put to the test. For what they don’t know, you or your trainers will be right there to teach them the correct way before it’s too late.

I hope this article provides you with some great ideas for fun and informative training sessions, especially if you develop occasional “training block,” where you have already done every idea you have for training.

Do you have a great training idea? E-mail it to me with any photos at MPDBUS1@aol.com, and you might see your idea featured in a future issue of SBF.

Michael Dallessandro is transportation supervisor at Lake Shore Central School District in Angola, N.Y., and a frequent contributor to SCHOOL BUS FLEET.

 

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