School Bus Fleet Blog
Wes Platt
Former Executive Editor
[Archives] Join us in an open-ended conversation about children and school buses – and the people who bring them together from SBF's editorial team and guest authors.
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SEARCHMENUSEARCHWes Platt
Former Executive Editor
[Archives] Join us in an open-ended conversation about children and school buses – and the people who bring them together from SBF's editorial team and guest authors.
I read an interesting article in the Houston Chronicle about the difficulty the local transit agency has had in recruiting Hispanic employees. The agency's efforts to bring more Hispanics into its ranks included advertising in the newspaper and on the radio, as well as Spanish-language TV. It also attended job fairs and held its own job fairs. To no avail. In trying to fill 250 spots for bus drivers, it hired 10 Hispanics.
Read More →Why do we stay at one job longer than others? I've been here at School Bus Fleet Magazine for almost 13 years. The longest I stayed at any previous job was five years or so. Early in my career, I left some jobs after only a year.
Read More →A recent article in the Baltimore Sun discusses the use of GPS technology to allow parents to track the whereabouts of their children. The reporter engaged the issue by interviewing a mother who bought her 7-year-old daughter a cell phone equipped with a GPS tracking device after the girl was put on the wrong school bus by a substitute teacher.
Read More →If you're like me, you're constantly putting out fires. Most of them are small and don't require much thought or enterprise. But they sure add up! Over the course of a day, I attend to dozens of things that were not on my to-do list. Some of them could have been postponed, but they were easy to resolve and gave me a small sense of accomplishment.
Read More →Ever wonder why school bus crashes, even minor ones, tend to receive wide, out-of-proportion coverage in the local news? And the regional and national news, as well, depending on the casualty count? It's pretty simple, really. Stories about endangered children, especially if accompanied by photos or video footage, pique a community's interest. Local residents might have a friend or relative who attends the involved school. Plus, traffic accidents have high curiosity value, which may explain...
Read More →The two most populous states in the nation — California and Texas — now have laws on the books requiring school buses to be equipped with lap-shoulder seat belts for passengers. Texas joined California last week when its governor, Rick Perry, signed a bill requiring all new school buses bought after Sept. 1, 2010, to have three-point belt systems.
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