Ventura County Grand Jury
• 2008-2009
• Agency Response
Somis Union School District*
⚠️ Translation Notice: This content has been automatically translated. The original English text is the official version. Translation may contain errors.
⚠️ 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 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. School bus safety information is available from a variety of agencies including school districts, county offices, the California Highway Patrol and the California Department of Education.
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 Somis Union School District does not plan to implement this recommendation at this time.
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.