school bus driver issues

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP- parents like you are driving employees out of the system. Either volunteer to help be a monitor or pull your precious snowflake off the bus. Imagine driving 30+ loud children while trying to keep them safe and tell me you don’t get stressed. So obnoxious

Is that a thing? MCPS allows random parents to ride on the school bus?

I don't think bus drivers or anybody else should be abusive, I think that's a minimum standard, and I would hope the bus depot managers would agree.

We haven’t determined that the bus driver is being verbally abusive as yet. Just that some young kids don’t like yelling.

A parent would definitely have to be fingerprinted and fill out a mountain of paperwork to ride on a bus as a volunteer. With no consequences for misbehaving children and children not listening to I'm sure 100 reminders to behave from the bus driver, I totally understand bus drivers yelling, in attempt to get kids under control. With how horrible the pay is and how stressful managing children while dealing with MoCo traffic is, there's not a huge group of people waiting in the wings to take these jobs. Call the bus depot all you want but nothing's going to happen to the driver for "yelling."

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And this is why no one wants to work with school districts anymore. Has anyone even suggested going to the parents of the misbehaving kids?

+1
The kids are sooo loud on the bus, and they don't listen.

Maybe parents should offer to volunteer to be bus monitors.

Or ban the kids from the bus for a week, so that parents of the unruly kids have to drive them in. Maybe *then* the parents will parent their kids.

Imagine the stress of being a bus driver - and then being blamed. I hope OP is a troll.

OP is not a troll. My DD 14 has been taking the bus for 2+ years and this year she is flat out refusing to take the bus in the AM. Two reasons: overcrowding ( they have combined two routes in one bus) and since her stop is second last before school. There is literally a corner of a seat available for her to sit on, with a huge heavy bag and musical instrument; second the popular and some other rowdy students are too loud which makes the driver mad and makes her scream at them. The drivers also keep changing and a new driver will use a different rout and add another 10-15 mins to the already long trip ( by car it takes 7 mins to reach school, by bus is takes 35-50 mins). Certain drivers don’t let kids talk loudly but have extremely loud music blaring in the bus ( on the speaker).

There is definitely problem with both students misbehaving and certain ( especially new and inexperienced ) drivers ( who, btw, take wrong routes and speed ).

How can we start a petition for a second adult to be present on the bus? It is unfair to expect the driver to focus on safely driving and mind a bus load of teens. Alternatively, better mandatory training of all incoming and experienced drivers each year? I don’t know the solution and luckily we don’t live too far and I have a flexible job, so I can drive my child to school. However, this is not the case for a lot of parents.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And this is why no one wants to work with school districts anymore. Has anyone even suggested going to the parents of the misbehaving kids?

+1
The kids are sooo loud on the bus, and they don't listen.

Maybe parents should offer to volunteer to be bus monitors.

Or ban the kids from the bus for a week, so that parents of the unruly kids have to drive them in. Maybe *then* the parents will parent their kids.

Imagine the stress of being a bus driver - and then being blamed. I hope OP is a troll.

OP is not a troll. My DD 14 has been taking the bus for 2+ years and this year she is flat out refusing to take the bus in the AM. Two reasons: overcrowding ( they have combined two routes in one bus) and since her stop is second last before school. There is literally a corner of a seat available for her to sit on, with a huge heavy bag and musical instrument; second the popular and some other rowdy students are too loud which makes the driver mad and makes her scream at them. The drivers also keep changing and a new driver will use a different rout and add another 10-15 mins to the already long trip ( by car it takes 7 mins to reach school, by bus is takes 35-50 mins). Certain drivers don’t let kids talk loudly but have extremely loud music blaring in the bus ( on the speaker).

There is definitely problem with both students misbehaving and certain ( especially new and inexperienced ) drivers ( who, btw, take wrong routes and speed ).

How can we start a petition for a second adult to be present on the bus? It is unfair to expect the driver to focus on safely driving and mind a bus load of teens. Alternatively, better mandatory training of all incoming and experienced drivers each year? I don’t know the solution and luckily we don’t live too far and I have a flexible job, so I can drive my child to school. However, this is not the case for a lot of parents.

Edit: I should have proof read before posting. I apologize for the numerous grammatical errors in my post above.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And this is why no one wants to work with school districts anymore. Has anyone even suggested going to the parents of the misbehaving kids?

+1
The kids are sooo loud on the bus, and they don't listen.

Maybe parents should offer to volunteer to be bus monitors.

Or ban the kids from the bus for a week, so that parents of the unruly kids have to drive them in. Maybe *then* the parents will parent their kids.

Imagine the stress of being a bus driver - and then being blamed. I hope OP is a troll.

OP is not a troll. My DD 14 has been taking the bus for 2+ years and this year she is flat out refusing to take the bus in the AM. Two reasons: overcrowding ( they have combined two routes in one bus) and since her stop is second last before school. There is literally a corner of a seat available for her to sit on, with a huge heavy bag and musical instrument; second the popular and some other rowdy students are too loud which makes the driver mad and makes her scream at them. The drivers also keep changing and a new driver will use a different rout and add another 10-15 mins to the already long trip ( by car it takes 7 mins to reach school, by bus is takes 35-50 mins). Certain drivers don’t let kids talk loudly but have extremely loud music blaring in the bus ( on the speaker).

There is definitely problem with both students misbehaving and certain ( especially new and inexperienced ) drivers ( who, btw, take wrong routes and speed ).

How can we start a petition for a second adult to be present on the bus? It is unfair to expect the driver to focus on safely driving and mind a bus load of teens. Alternatively, better mandatory training of all incoming and experienced drivers each year? I don’t know the solution and luckily we don’t live too far and I have a flexible job, so I can drive my child to school. However, this is not the case for a lot of parents.

My kid who rides a bus also hates it. They claim some kids fight on the bus everyday causing problems for everyone.

[Anonymous]

op here-just update if anyone is interested. Our issue was resolved and we were assigned a new and kind driver. Kiddo is happy!

[Anonymous]

In a few cases we've had to hold in place the bus because students are completely out of control. Sometimes we even have to remove them off and call the parents. And this is for elementary school! There are zero consequences and parents largely don't care.

[Anonymous]

Follow up.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:And this is why no one wants to work with school districts anymore. Has anyone even suggested going to the parents of the misbehaving kids?

+1
The kids are sooo loud on the bus, and they don't listen.

Maybe parents should offer to volunteer to be bus monitors.

All this time i thought that was the bus driver's job.

[Anonymous]

An incident on a Westland middle school bus:
https://www.dcurbanmom.com/jforum/posts/list/1203696.page