I recently interviewed Monica Coburn, transportation director at Bartholomew Consolidated School Corp. in Columbus, Ind., about a new training facility she developed with other transportation professionals in the state. The facility includes two buses modified for hands-on driver training in emergency situations. Look in the March issue of SBF for the full story.

After we talked about the facility and the types of training her drivers are participating in, she e-mailed me some photos and included this footnote: “Getting our drivers to buy into this training center was key. When I first began talking about training drivers, I got stonewalled…I formed a committee that included some of the more vocal stonewallers. We took that committee on a field trip to another facility in Indianapolis at Wayne Township Schools. They were stunned at the level of expectations and professionalism. Our drivers came away wanting to know how we could get a professional development training started and a facility to assist with that training.”

It really struck me how successful Monica was in convincing her drivers that training was such a positive thing, not by bullying them into taking on extra work, but by bringing them into the process and inviting them to see what they could learn. It can be difficult to sell employees on a new idea, but by taking extra steps to involve them in decision making, Monica turned those who were most resistant to the idea into the biggest proponents.

Drivers aren’t the only ones training to make school transportation the safest it can be. I found an article on a firefighting trade publication’s Website describing the process of acquiring school buses for firemen to train on.

Tom Kiurski, director of fire safety education for Livonia (Mich.) Fire & Rescue, tells how he led firefighters through three weeks of school bus fire training. “Since school buses constitute a major mode of transportation in most communities, it makes sense to train on these vehicles,” he writes.

In the first week, participants met in a classroom setting to learn about the “anatomy” of a school bus, as well as bus types and safety features. During the following week, the hands-on training began, with firefighters learning how to stabilize a bus that has flipped on its side. Lastly, firefighters practiced removing windows and cutting into the bus using a variety of tools.

I’ve found that it’s not unusual for people to get enthusiastic around school buses. Learning how they work and contributing to the safety of the children that ride them seems to have gotten the firefighters pretty pumped up, too. As Kiurski writes, the response to the training session was so overwhelming that they had to limit local fire departments to sending just two firefighters.

To read the full story, click here.

--Claire Atkinson, Senior Editor