Ventura County Grand Jury
• 2008-2009
• Agency Response
Unified School District Educating Tomorrow's Leaders*
⚠️ Aviso de traducción: Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
⚠️ Este contenido ha sido traducido automáticamente. El texto original en inglés es la versión oficial. La traducción puede contener errores.
Findings and Recommendations 3 findings
F03
Page 4
Not all districts maintain information on school bus safety statistics. Some districts do not track this information at all, while others rely on their contracted bus companies to do so. We disagree with this statement because of its broad implications that school districts do not maintain records in accordance with established law. Under current California law, Oak Park Unified School District is not required to maintain and report specific statistics related to school bus accidents. That requirement resides with the California Highway Patrol.
Related Recommendations (1)
R03
Page 5
The Districts should use the VCOE standard form recommended in R-02, above, to collect school bus safety information, report this information to the VCOE, and post it on district websites. In its response to the Grand Jury's report, the Ventura County Office of Education (VCOE) stated that it does not plan to implement Grand Jury recommendation R-02. Specifically, VCOE stated that it "does not have the authority over the public school districts and private schools in the County of Ventura to require these agencies to report this type of statistical information. In addition, during this time of severe budget cut backs to our schools, without specific legal mandates, it is not reasonable to place additional data collection requirements on VCOE. As a result, VCOE does not plan to implement this recommendation at this time." Accordingly, Oak Park Unified School District does not plan to implement Grand Jury recommendation R-03.
F04
Page 4
Due to the lack of comparable, consistent school bus safety statistics provided by the districts, it is not possible to determine objective measures of school bus safety, such as accident rates. Thus, it is difficult to conclude that school bus transportation in the County is safe, as previously demonstrated at the national level. It is only possible to infer that school bus transportation in the County is safe from the information provided by the districts. We disagree with this statement because of its broad implications that school districts do not maintain records in accordance with established law. Under California law, Oak Park Unified School District is not required to maintain and report specific statistics related to school bus accidents. The California Highway Patrol is required to investigate school bus accidents and has a database capable of tracking the accidents by county. This data is available to the public and could be used to make an educated conclusion of the number of accidents per mile driven or per student served.
No recommendations for this finding
F05
Page 4
School bus safety statistics, for districts or for individual schools, are not readily available to the public. We disagree with this statement. We believe that the public has access to and can obtain all the school bus accident and transportation program information that the California Highway Patrol and Oak Park Unified School District are mandated to collect and report. RECOMMENDATIONS THAT WILL NOT BE IMPLEMENTED.
No recommendations for this finding
* This report's PDF did not contain easily extractable text and required Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for analysis. There may be minor errors in the extracted findings and recommendations due to OCR limitations with scanned documents.