Incident brings shortfall in communication procedures to light
The Greene County schools transportation department developed a new protocol for handling bus incidents after a parent posted a rant on social media Monday when her children’s school bus went in the ditch that morning.
Greene County sheriff Steve Haupert’s daily report for Monday stated that at 7:58 am a deputy and an Iowa State Patrol officer responded to the report of a bus that had been driven off the roadway on 200th St at K Ave northwest of Jefferson. None of the five children on the bus were injured. A Department of Transportation enforcement officer inspected the bus for mechanical failures but found none. Bus driver Harry Silbaugh, 68, was cited for failure to maintain control.
Silbaugh, according to the angry parent, is a “wonderful, caring man,” “the nicest man you could meet.” She said her children love him. Her ire was not directed toward him, but toward a lack of communication about the situation.
The five children are neighbors and cousins. The parent was angry that her children’s pick up time is about 7 am. The bus went in the ditch nearby, only yards from one of the family’s home, but neither set of parents was notified until 9 am, after the children had been picked up by another bus and taken to school. When the mothers called their children’s schools to check on their well-being, staff at the schools, neither teachers nor the school nurse, had been alerted by anyone except the children of the incident.
School superintendent Tim Christensen answered questions about the incident on Tuesday. He explained that Silbaugh had reached to pick something up from the floor of the bus, and in that short moment lost control on the gravel road. As the mother’s picture shows, the shoulder is narrow and grassy and the ditch is grassy. The bus sustained only minimal damage. Silbaugh has driven a school bus since April, 2011.
“We have addressed this with our drivers and feel it is an isolated incident,” Christensen said. “Getting students to school safely and providing them a quality education is our primary goal. We have excellent, well trained drivers and a yellow school bus remains one of the safest means of transportation.”
He also said that the school has now put a protocol in place to assure more timely communication with parents in such situations, saying that on Monday, the school did not do an “adequate job.”
