Santa Clara Elementary School District*

Published: June 28, 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 school districts do not maintain records in accordance with established law. Santa Clara Elementary does not have a student transportation program. The District contracts once a year with a bus company to transport students to a field trip. SCESD 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 Santa Clara Elementary School District does not plan to implement this recommendation at this time. Response to Grand Jury Report Form Report Title: School Bus Safety Report Date: June 3, 2011 Response by: Kari Skidmore, Principal/Superintendent FINDINGS I (we) agree with the findings numbered: I (we) disagree wholly or partially with the findings numbered: FI-03, 04, 05 (Attach a statement specifying any portions of the findings that are disputed; include an explanation of the reasons therefor.) RECOMMENDATIONS Recommendations numbered _____ have been implemented. (Attach a summary describing the implemented actions.) Recommendations numbered have not yet been implemented, but will be implemented in the future. (Attach a timeframe for the implementation.) (Attach a timeframe for the implementation.) ■ Recommendations numbered ______require further analysis. (Attach an explanation and the scope and parameters of an analysis or study, and a timeframe for the matter to be prepared for discussion by the officer or director of the agency or department being investigated or reviewed, including the governing body of the public agency when applicable. This timeframe shall not exceed six months from the date of publication of the grand jury report.) Recommendation numbered R-03 will not be implemented because it is not warranted or are not reasonable. (Attach an explanation.) Date: June 28, 2011 Signed: Kari Shydnen Number of pages attached:

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.