In December, a mom on Long Island, New York, watched her young daughter get onto a school bus, then had to when a car came speeding past on the shoulder. That same month in Minnesota, a child leaving his school bus had to by a pickup truck.

Drivers nationwide continue to barrel illegally past stopped school buses, endangering children and caregivers — and sometimes worse. But some states have found it hard to enforce relatively new laws allowing on-board bus camera systems that record the violations.

Recent deaths during school bus stops include those of a and in separate Texas crashes last year and of a high school student in in 2022. They highlight continued careless driving around school buses despite flashing stop signs and obvious camera lenses. The recklessness may be part of of more aggressive driving noted by authorities that has caused more traffic deaths despite fewer miles driven overall since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A of school bus drivers last year, conducted by the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, 242,000 vehicles illegally passed school buses in a single day. That was up from the 232,000 for 2019. That year, passed laws to allow automatic camera surveillance to catch suspected violators.

Almost half of states have such laws now. and considered, but didn’t pass, similar legislation last year. A school bus camera program in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was  last year amid debates in the state legislature over the size of fines and their impact on low-income communities.

But there are several reasons why enforcement might not have been as effective as intended.

Some safety authorities object to new camera laws that reduced fines and excluded license points and other more punitive actions allowed when the same violations are caught in person by law enforcement. Legislatures may have softened school bus penalties to gain consensus among skeptical lawmakers, authorities say.

Some states also are struggling with the limitations of cameras when it comes to enforcing laws requiring evidence police officers can see in person but cameras might not catch. The cameras might not show school bus markings mentioned in the law or whether students are actively getting on or off buses. Another technical issue: School bus cameras have flagged cars on different streets or in lanes separated by medians, where they’re not legally required to stop.

How it works

Typically, the automatic cameras are engaged when a bus driver turns on a flashing stop sign, triggering a computer program that detects violations and sends them to reviewers to check before mailing a violation notice. But the cameras can’t capture everything.

On New York’s Long Island, a state appeals court a $250 ticket in November, saying evidence from bus cameras isn’t enough to prove a violation. Judges on the court said the camera did not establish that the school bus had correct markings or that it was actively picking up or dropping off passengers at the time of the ticket. That decision could endanger $25 million in annual fines from one county alone if other tickets are struck down.

In Pittsburgh, a district court judge told Stateline he dismisses most cases based on school bus cameras for insufficient evidence from the cameras.

Judge James Motznik said he also objects to the way Pennsylvania’s law, like most state laws allowing automatic camera evidence to identify bus-passing violations, undermines a traffic law that’s more punitive. The camera violations are issued as “civil complaints” with a lower fine and no loss of license points as required by the original traffic law against passing a stopped school bus.

“It was sold as a deterrent to enhance public safety,” Motznik said. “But it’s actually less of a deterrent. If a police officer witnessed this, there’d be a $500 fine, a license suspension, points toward losing your license. A camera sees the same thing, it’s $300 and goodbye.”

State legislatures sometimes have used less-punitive fines, without license points or suspensions, as a bargaining chip to reach agreement on camera enforcement such as school bus cameras, said Russ Martin, senior director of policy and government relations for the Governors Highway Safety Association.

“The thought was like, ‘We can make this more accepted by the public.’” Martin said. “But there’s another side to it. In some ways the points are more important than the fines for the worst violators — it means you can’t just pay your way out.”

Pennsylvania’s law on school bus cameras was updated last year partly to allow a lower-cost way for motorists to contest tickets, using a state hearing officer in a free process instead of a court that requires filing fees, said Jennifer Kuntch, a spokesperson for the state transportation department. Pittsburgh schools recorded more than 9,000 violations since the bus camera program began in July, the district  last month.

The appeals court ruling was vexing for local governments, said Paul Sabatino, an attorney and former Suffolk County legislative counsel. Cameras are a necessary part of enforcing the law against passing stopped school buses, he said.

“You can’t allow people to endanger children like that, and you can’t call out the National Guard to watch every school bus at every stop,” Sabatino said.

Many school districts use contractors such as Virginia-based BusPatrol, which claims 90% of the market for school bus cameras, with some competition from others such as RedSpeed USA and American Bus Video. The companies may include school bus stop-arm cameras within a package of other automated traffic enforcement.

Justin Meyers, president of BusPatrol, said the company already has addressed evidence questions in New York state by adding to its “evidence packets” the school bus markings and maps showing the bus is on an established route. Suffolk County is the company’s biggest customer, and BusPatrol has made a $40 million investment in equipping school buses there, Meyers said in an interview. It also operates in Pittsburgh.

The company uses computer algorithms and artificial intelligence to detect violations, which are then screened for accuracy by a BusPatrol employee before going to local law enforcement for a final decision on whether to issue a violation notice, Meyers said.

Few statistics available

There are few statistics on the extent of deaths and injuries from passing stopped school buses. Pennsylvania reviewed crash records at Stateline’s request and said 12 such crashes occurred in 2022 and 13 in 2021, with one death in each year — one a student, one a parent — and 23 injuries across both years. Those figures include a that killed a 16-year-old high school student in November 2022 as she was trying to board a school bus in York County.

Across the country, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found 53 fatalities, half of them school-age children, between 2000 and 2021 in accidents involving illegal passing of a school bus, according to an analysis requested by Stateline.

In Minnesota, school districts can apply for state funds to install school bus cameras. The Edina school district sought money last year after an “alarming” increase in bus-passing violations reported by bus drivers, along with two injuries to students, according to a The district won $105,000 for cameras, a cost of about $4,000 per bus, and in January reported drivers had been ticketed for 70% of passing violations noticed by bus drivers, up from 5% without cameras.

In one of the Texas fatalities last year, a woman helping her child onto a bus in Upshur County was killed by a vehicle passing the bus, Sgt. Adam Albritton, a spokesperson for the state Department of Public Safety, told Stateline. The crash was reported, a driver was charged with manslaughter, and police are reviewing footage from a video camera on the bus for evidence, Albritton said.

Texas was an early adopter of video cameras to catch school bus passing violations, commissioning a on such cameras. The state did not include school bus cameras in its in 2019. Not all school districts participate, but Austin, Dallas and San Antonio are among those that do.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Stateline maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Scott S. Greenberger for questions: info@stateline.org. Follow Stateline on and .

Rep. Pat Heinert says North Dakota should think about throwing some federal driver’s licensing requirements under the bus.

“I’ve come up with the wild idea of creating a bus driver’s license for North Dakota,” Heinert said during a school funding committee meeting on Nov. 28.

Maybe it’s not so crazy. Maybe it is.

Mike Heilman, executive director of the , said his group and others have been looking into waivers for parts of the federal commercial driver’s license requirements that bus drivers are required to have.

Specifically, the state may be able to waive the “under-the-hood” requirement as part of the CDL training.

“There are several states that have an under-the-hood exemption,” Heilman told the committee on Nov. 28.

Part of the pre-bus inspection requires knowing how to spot potential problems with the engine.

“The mechanic needs to know this but not necessarily the bus driver,” Heilman said.

Brad Schaffer, driver license director for the North Dakota Department of Transportation, says that yes, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, which sets the rules for CDL requirements, does allow states to grant the “under the hood” exemption. But he said his department has decided against the move.

He said that someone obtaining a Class B CDL with the waiver would limit their driving:

They would only be able to drive a school bus, preventing them from driving a bus for another purpose, such as for a church group.It would mean they couldn’t drive across state lines.

He said there also is a possibility that the federal agency could decide to discontinue the waivers, forcing drivers to start over.

Schaffer said his department looked at other states that offer under-the-hood waiver and didn’t see much benefit.

Schaffer said the department can grant individual requests for under-the-hood waivers, but when potential CDL drivers learn about the restrictions, they back off. The department has not issued any such waivers this year.

He also said he didn’t think there would be a significant time savings on training with the waiver.

Other options?

Could there be other ways to create a light version of the CDL?

Levi Bachmeier, business manager for West Fargo Public Schools and a former policy adviser to Gov. Doug Burgum, said ideas are worth exploring.

Making it easier to get a CDL is one strategy to address the bus driver shortage in North Dakota and around the country.

A national survey on school busing released in 2021 showed 51% of respondents described their driver shortage as “severe” or “desperate;” and 78% indicated that the driver shortage is getting “much worse” or “a little worse.”

That has forced school districts to rethink transportation routes and services.

Alexis Baxley, executive director of the , said districts of all sizes are struggling to fill driving spots.

In Bismarck, she said drivers are having to drive two routes. The Northern Cass School District had to temporarily drop rural service this fall, offering only in-town pickup.

Other options include dropping door-to-door service, instead creating bus stops, and running longer routes. Baxley said longer routes can be especially hard on young students.

“Getting them to school is the most important thing,” Baxley said.

She said her group and the Small Organized Schools want to gather data.

“In order to identify a solution, we feel that we need to dig in and get some really hard data, something more than anecdotal, and see if we can really identify perhaps the biggest barriers to recruitment or the biggest barriers in the licensure process,” Baxley said.

Added safety requirement, fewer tests

The feds in February actually added a safety training requirement, though Schaffer said anyone who has held a CDL for two or more years qualifies as a trainer, and there is no time requirement.

Still, North Dakota has administered fewer CDL tests in 2023 than in years past.

As of Dec. 5, the state had given about 2,000 CDLs, on pace for between 2,200 and 2,300 for the year.

That’s behind 2022’s 3,000 tests and 2,700 in 2021.

Competition with industry

Bachmeier said West Fargo has covered most of the cost for drivers to obtain a CDL but that has been abused by drivers leaving for higher-paying jobs in private industry.

Heinert, a Republican from Bismarck and a former sheriff, admitted that a North Dakota-specific license may not be practical with the federal regulations that exist.

But Bachmeier agreed with Heinert that a lower training standard would help address the problem.

“If we can find a way to lower the training barriers, we can find a way to lower our competition with private providers that are always going to always out-compete us on a wage perspective, we may be able to affect some of the supply and demand issues that we have with bus drivers.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. North Dakota Monitor maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Amy Dalrymple for questions: info@northdakotamonitor.com. Follow North Dakota Monitor on and .

Hartford, Connecticut is a $5,000 signing incentive for educators in high-demand subjects like math, science and bilingual education. Taos, New Mexico a $50,000 starting salary for any new teacher hire, plus a $10,000 bonus. Stanly County Schools in North Carolina also a $10,000 signing incentive.

“We wanted to give teachers [an] … incentive to come to beautiful Taos,” Superintendent Lillian Torrez told ����Ӱ�� via email. Funding provided by the federal government through the American Rescue Plan “has helped with this project,” she said.

In an extreme example, Gallup-McKinley County Schools in New Mexico is incentivizing teachers to join the district’s ranks by dangling bonuses ranging between , plus $2,500 to 4,500 for relocation — a grand sum that could top out around $25,000.

Bus drivers, too, are in short supply. Lower Merion, a school system outside Philadelphia, announced a for drivers to join the district’s ranks. California’s Eureka Union School District is offering .

“Hiring school bus drivers with BIG incentives!” one Eureka posting reads.

Burbio, a data service that has tracked school policy through the pandemic, said that while districts have been using incentives to attract workers for months, the dollar amounts recently have ballooned — perhaps reflecting a last-ditch effort to get fully staffed by the first day of school. 

“In the past few weeks, we have noted a marked increase in the size and duration of these payments,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche wrote in the company’s .

The generous bonuses are only the latest examples of the extreme lengths school systems are taking to handle what some experts are calling a staffing “.”&�Բ�����;

In Texas, several rural districts are due to lack of staff. In Florida, leaders are asking with no teaching experience to serve in classrooms. In Arizona, some children may soon receive instruction from rather than certified teachers. And in Buffalo, New York, a driver shortage has prompted leaders to consider providing a to parents who opt to drive their children rather than put them on the bus.

Throughout the pandemic, K-12 staff shortages have disproportionately affected impoverished districts. Yet even large school systems have felt the effects. In early August, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Public Schools in North Carolina announced they had — more than six times the number of open positions this time last year.

Nationwide, there were roughly 300,000 openings for education jobs in June, according to the most recent numbers from the . Other data indicate the total could be even higher: A representative sample of the nation’s nearly 100,000 schools reported an average of three teacher vacancies and another three unfilled non-teaching positions such as for custodial staff, cafeteria workers or bus drivers in a June survey from the National Center for Education Statistics — hinting there could be close to 600,000 openings.

Vacancies, however, do not necessarily mean that campuses are short-staffed. Unfilled positions can also arise because schools added new roles, explained Chad Aldeman, policy director of Georgetown University’s Edunomics Lab.

“Districts are currently flush with cash thanks to the infusion of $190 billion in federal aid. As a result, many districts have ambitious hiring plans to add more teachers, mental health supports, instructional aides, or tutors,” he wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

More than three-quarters of school systems have increased their total number of employees above pre-pandemic levels, including both teaching and non-teaching roles, a recent from the Rand Corporation found. 

“In short, we believe it is districts’ increase in number of staff that they seek to employ rather than an exodus from teaching that is straining the teacher labor market,” the authors wrote.

Meanwhile, the economy added an unexpectedly large number of new jobs, according to the just-released federal report, including a seasonally adjusted in July. With unemployment rates down to just and a continued decline in the share of Americans working or actively seeking work, there’s no indication the hiring landscape will ease anytime soon.

“Unemployment rates are low, meaning almost everyone who wants a job already has one,” said Aldeman. “All this competition may be hard on employers, but it’s good for the workers who are on the receiving end of these stipends and bonuses.”

“Districts are going to have to be aggressive and creative to find and keep employees in critical shortage areas,” he on Twitter.

That’s been the name of the game for Supt. Torrez in Taos, New Mexico. On her district’s is a scrolling, full-screen slideshow of the benefits for new hires: 

“WE’RE HIRING! Receive a $10,000 Additional Recruitment Incentive” 

“LISTEN TO WHY TEACHERS LOVE TEACHING AT TAOS SCHOOLS! Click below for video and then click on the right arrow for the application!”

“WOULD YOU LIKE A $10,000 SIGN-ON RECRUITMENT INCENTIVE FOR A NEW JOB AS A TMS TEACHER? Click below for the application!”

She is not concerned with why the market is strained, but rather on how she can navigate those conditions and still ensure her district has a full teacher corps when her 2,100 students return to buildings Aug. 11. The $10,000 signing bonuses, she says, have enticed 10 candidates, but 7 open positions remain.

“We still have a few openings,” she said. “However, I would call [the incentives] a success, overall.”