Habersham’s Board of Education focuses, in each meeting, on a specific part of its Strategic Plan, said superintendent Matthew Cooper Monday night. In that meeting, board members and the public heard about the school system’s Transportation Department – and its fleet of 130 buses.
Tim Dockery, director of the department, said “we’re all about safety” and explained how Habersham’s transportation of nearly 7,000 students had a nearly perfect safety record last year. He explained plans for a safe 2016.
Each of Habersham’s school buses has three cameras, he said, directed toward a different location on the bus. There are memory cards, he said, for storage of recordings that can be viewed if there are questions about students’ behavior on the buses. Not all students ride the bus to and from school, he said, but there usually is some opportunity for every student to ride on a school bus during the school year. There are field trips, athletic events, and other activities when the bus is ridden, he said.
Administrative Assistant Stephanie Walker explained another way bus trips are made safer for each student. Walker and other transportation department members visited every school in Habersham last year – and performed emergency evacuation drills with all students.
Student safety is addressed in an additional way with the stop signs that unfold from the side of the bus, Dockery said. Ideally, drivers stop their cars and do not pass a school bus that has stopped. Dockery and Superintendent Cooper stressed that Habersham’s Sheriff’s Department and all cities’ police departments, in cooperation with the school system, routinely park and watch for drivers of cars that do not stop when the stop sign arm is extended on a bus. “There are no warning tickets given,” Cooper said, when a driver passes a school bus that has stopped and has its stop sign extended. In fact, he said, when ticketed drivers go to court, “there are big fines.”
