By ROBERT J. TORONGEAU

In reference to all the stories in your paper and on TV Channel 13 about school bus safety: Give the bus companies a break. The story focuses on one company with a bunch of major problems, thus they lump all the buses with that company.

I drive a school bus and it only takes one light to be out to get rejected/out of service. Then the media makes a big deal out of a bus being rejected. My bus was rejected because a driver dome light was out. It was not out; they were turning on the wrong switch! There are over 40 lights on the outside, over 10 lights on the inside, and over 25 switches (low and high speed, etc.) on the inside. If one of them is not working the bus can be rejected! Most of these are not major safety issues, but the media lump us all together. 

If your readers, listeners, watchers and parents are concerned with safety on the buses, take a look at the driver. He is driving down the road with a load of yelling, screaming, sometimes fighting students, being distracted, losing his focus on highway safety. Losing sight of the driver coming upon his blind spot, or being aware that a driver is not stopping for the bus stop arm, or for that matter being aware of the driver coming up on a red light and that the driver is not going to stop and will hit the bus!

I cross railroad tracks over 20 times a day on my bus route; sometimes it is impossible to hear over the noise the students are making, let alone hear an emergency vehicle approaching your bus. It is no wonder there is such a turnover of school bus drivers — low pay, no respect, no benefits, at the bottom of the food chain! Let alone the fear of a lawsuit if involved in an accident, whether it is the bus driver’s fault or not.   

What is the answer? School bus monitors on some of the troubled buses. Oh yeah, sure there are cams on the buses. Wrong! Not all the buses! I had to switch buses earlier in the year — mine did not have a cam, because a third-grader accused me of hitting him. You go home and sleep at night with that hanging over your head! He finally admitted he was lying, but not before I was interviewed by the Child Protection Department and ACS people two or three times.

You folks on the school board or are running for the school board need to look into this problem. All we hear is there is no money. What happened to the million dollars that was allotted for ACS Corp. buses? 

One last thing. Everyone reading this, is your license plate light on your car working? Bet you have at least one light not working; enough that you would have to walk to work because your car would be out of service! 

Robert J. Torongeau is an Anderson resident.