State seeks to keep pedophiles off school buses

People who commit any crime involving a child could face a lifetime ban on working as a school bus driver under new regulations being considered by the state school board.

In addition, bus drivers would have to be equipped with seat-belt cutters to help themselves or students escape after an accident, and school districts would be allowed to stretch the life spans on their buses from 20 to 25 years.

Those are the highlights emerging after a years-long effort to update bus safety regulations. “They haven’t been touched since 1993,” said Keith Dreiling, the state director of pupil transportation.

He said the lifetime ban on people convicted of crimes involving a child was proposed by a law enforcement representative on a committee that drafted the regulations. He said he couldn’t remember exactly who made the proposal because the meeting was about three years ago.

“What the committee said was: ‘What you’re telling us is if somebody’s convicted as a pedophile, after 10 years he can drive a school bus?’” Dreiling said. “They said, ‘That’s not right.”

The process has taken so long because the rules have to be reviewed at several levels of government, including lawyers with the Department of Education, the Department of Administration and the Attorney General’s Office.

Current regulations on bus driver hiring say that a person who has committed a crime involving a child doesn’t have to report that to the hiring agency, whether that’s a school district or private bus contractor, if the conviction was more than 10 years ago.

The rewritten rule removes the 10-year threshold, making it a lifetime prohibition. Dreiling said that makes the regulations for bus drivers consistent with the regulations for teachers.

The regulations do keep a 10-year ban on bus driving by those who have committed other felonies or major traffic violations, including hit-and-run driving, vehicular homicide, reckless driving and driving under the influence.

Drivers with repeated smaller violations that add up to a license suspension are also banned from driving a bus for 10 years.

Weed out applicants

While the language in the lifetime ban specifies “any crime involving a child,” the goal is to weed out applicants who endanger children, Dreiling said.

Drug crimes, alcohol crimes, battery, theft and child neglect would be examples of non-sex crimes involving a child that could also trigger the lifetime ban on bus driving, he said.

No one knows how many, if any, bus drivers currently on the road would lose their jobs because of crimes committed more than 10 years ago, which haven’t previously had to be reported.

Despite the broad language, the regulation won’t be interpreted to include crimes in which a child is not a victim, said Denise Kahler, the Education Department’s director of communications.

For example, a father who took his children hiking and got arrested for trespassing wouldn’t be banned from driving a school bus, she said.

The change is not expected to have an impact in the Wichita school district, said spokeswoman Susan Arensman.

Wichita contracts for transportation with a private company called First Student. But Arensman said district employees also run background checks on the company’s drivers and will object if something amiss is found in the police record.

Arensman said she confirmed with First Student that no drivers with a felony conviction are hired as bus drivers.

Local officials with First Student referred calls seeking comment to the company’s media hotline in Cincinnati. No one returned a message left at that number.

Catching up

The change in the regulations on seat-belt cutters is an effort to catch the state up with what has become standard practice across the country, Dreiling said. He estimated about 75 percent of Kansas school buses already had cutters aboard.

Students in regular school buses don’t have seat belts, but the drivers do, he said. In an accident, the driver may need to cut his or her own belt to get free to help the children.

Buses used to transport pre-kindergarten and special-needs students are equipped with seat belts.

The type of cutter mandated for drivers has a shielded blade so if a student got ahold of it, “he’d really need to work at it” to hurt himself, Dreiling said.

The provision extending the service life of school buses from 20 years to 25 is being added to the regulations to comply with a law passed by the state Legislature, Dreiling said.

Arensman said that probably also doesn’t affect Wichita because the district requires First Student to use newer buses. No buses transporting Wichita students are older than 10 years, she said.

She said that provision appears to be aimed at smaller rural districts that buy their own buses and “are trying to suck as much life out of them as possible.”

The state Board of Education will meet in Topeka for two days next week. The board is scheduled to hold a public hearing on the bus regulations May 11 and vote on May 12.

This story was originally published May 4, 2017 at 8:15 AM with the headline "State seeks to keep pedophiles off school buses."