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I want to make it clear that this article in no way is meant to blame any of the people involved in what appears, by all accounts, to have been a tragic accident when a Brooklyn school bus killed a 4-year-old boy in Boro Park on February 17. But as a father who knows the pain of burying his own children only too well, I believe that it is important to ask if there is any room for improvement in our school bus safety procedures. From the brief discussions I have had with people about busing, there does seem to be some larger safety issues to address. Unlike most secular neighborhoods that are serviced by relatively few buses, our communities often have school buses from dozens of schools operating in the same short time frames along the same busy streets. It is not hard to imagine the impatience of other drivers on their way to work getting stuck behind multiple buses making multiple stops on every block. This reality forces our buses to move quickly and not wait for students to arrive and be seated or exit safely. In the last few days I have heard several parents describe regularly observing unsafe school bus practices, either in their neighborhood or during their drive to work. These include picking up children from the wrong side of a boulevard, individual school buses making multiple stops on the same block, buses leaving the bus stop area before children are seated and buses dropping off children onto snow banks. School bus safety standards differ by state and locality, but there are a few common sense procedures we can implement that can improve school bus safety. Students should be waiting outside when their bus arrives (even when it is cold), standing in a well-lit, safe spot on the sidewalk at least six feet away from the street. The entire area, from the place the students stand and wait, all the way to the place where the school bus door will open should be cleared of snow and ice. Students should wait for the bus to come to a complete stop and open its door before moving toward the street and then walk in an orderly single file line, boarding carefully. Buses should not leave the bus stop before all students are safely seated. It is better when school buses stop on the same side of the street as the children who are boarding and exiting. This is especially true for primary streets with traffic moving in both directions. Buses should never pick up or drop off children from the wrong side of a boulevard. It would be difficult to implement these standards under our current school bus models. While I understand that implementing change often comes with unfortunate
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