Ventura County Grand Jury • 2008-2009 • Agency Response
Response to: School District Administration: Is the Cost Too High?

School Bus Safety,*

Published: August 17, 2011 4 pages
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Findings and Recommendations 3 findings

F03 Page 2
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 implications that the school district does not maintain records in accordance with established law. Mupu Elementary School District does not operate a student transportation program, and has not had any incidents regarding school bus safety on field trips or special education transportation. The District contracts with a bus company to transport students on field trips. For special education students, the district in which the student receives services contracts with either a private bus company or with the Ventura County Office of Education Transportation Department to transport the students. Mupu Elementary 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 3
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. The State of California requires the California Highway Patrol to investigate all school bus accidents in the state. The accidents are reported by County in the CHP Database. Reporting the accidents in another database is not mandated by law, and therefore, would not provide the public with consistent and accurate information regarding school bus safety. Based on these reasons the Mupu Elementary School District does not plan to implement this recommendation at this time. If the Ventura County Office of Education is mandated to implement R-03 and provide a form and a database for school bus safety information, then Mupu would participate. Response to Grand Jury Report Form Report Title: School Bus Safety Report Date: June 3, 2011 Response by: Jeanine Gore, Superintendent/Principal, on behalf of the Governing Board of Trustees, Mupu Elementary School District <b>FINDINGS</b> I (we) agree with the findings numbered: I (we) disagree wholly or partially with the findings numbered: FI-03, 04, 05 (See attached statement) RECOMMENDATIONS Recommendations numbered have been implemented. Recommendations numbered _____ have not yet been implemented, but will be implemented in the future. Recommendations numbered ______require further analysis. 9 ¥ Recommendation numbered R-03 will not be implemented because it is not warranted or is not reasonable. (See attached statement) Jeanine Gore, Superintendent/Principal Date: August 17, 2011 Signed: Number of pages attached: 2
F04 Page 2
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 implications that school districts do not maintain records in accordance with established law. The California Highway Patrol is required to investigate school bus accidents and has a database which tracks the accidents by county. The public is able to access this data. These reports could be used to determine the number of accidents per mile driven or per student served.
No recommendations for this finding
F05 Page 2
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 CHP and VCOE 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.