As always, the reader comments are telling. Read what the defenders of the school system write. "DSC" drinks the District kool-aid. If "DSC" learned to slip in the comment that "these are broad brush attacks", he/she might get a promotion.
Find the fun here: School Year Has 'A Very Strange' Beginning
Just so we put transportation in perspective, let us not forget Eric Martin.
Right bus, wrong stop, devastating consequences
Eric Martin died three years ago when a car struck him as he walked home from the wrong bus stop, 5 miles from home. Could it happen again?
By LOGAN D. MABE, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 3, 2002
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ODESSA -- Kimberly Martin lives every parent's nightmare. It's the one in which a child goes off to school on a big yellow bus and never makes it home again.
Three years later, she's haunted by the images -- real and imagined -- that come with the night. A former paramedic, Martin has seen more than her share of human suffering -- which only brings into sharper focus the tragedy of her own son's death.
"I still need assistance sleeping at night because I have horror stories of things I've personally witnessed," Martin said. "And it's too easy for me to put my baby's face there."
Eric Martin, a sixth-grader at Walker Middle School, was 10 years old and 5 miles from home when he was dropped off at the wrong school bus stop Oct. 28, 1999. It was the first day of an after-school tutoring class, so he went home on a different bus with a different driver who had different bus stops.
In the growing darkness, Eric set out on the long walk from VillaRosa to his family's house in Wyndham Lakes. He was hit and instantly killed on Lutz-Lake Fern Road.
Kimberly Martin sued the Hillsborough County School Board claiming negligence on the part of bus driver Linda Moore, who was driving Eric's bus that day.
The case never went to court. The School Board settled out of court for the state-mandated maximum of $200,000. Martin says she didn't sue for money but to bring attention to what she calls a flawed system.
"They paid the absolute maximum that the law would ever require of them," said the Martins' attorney, Dale Swope. "The aspiration now is to use the funds that they got to help get the message out to people. We can track FedEx packages across the country, and they can tell you where your $13 package is at any point in time. But we don't have any method to track our children once they get on a school bus."
Changing the rules of the road
Did Eric Martin's death result in any policy or procedural changes in the way the school district transports children? It's hard to say.
On the advice of legal counsel, the district's director of transportation declined to discuss procedures in the context of the Martin case. Mark Hart, the district's spokesman, released a statement saying that dismissal procedures are regularly reviewed. Bus drivers now get a "rollover" list of student passengers to help drivers at the beginning of the school year. And elementary school officials now have an instructional video tape on effective dismissals to watch.
Hart emphasized that these changes were in the works before Eric's death.
"Eric Martin on his regular bus run was always picked up and dropped off at the same spot," Hart said. "But because he was enrolled in the extended learning (tutoring) program, the routes were modified accordingly. He still had a stop on his street, but not the same stop that he would have gotten on at in the morning."
Hart said a Walker guidance counselor met with Eric when he was enrolled in the tutoring program and discussed the bus situation with him. The counselor even gave him bus information to take home to his parents, Hart said.
Kimberly Martin said she never saw it.
"We really don't know why Eric didn't flag it when the bus turned out of his subdivision, but we do know that the bus driver asked him multiple times whether he was at the right stop when he was let off," Hart said. "And he indicated that he was."
Trying to explain what happened
From the deposition of transportation general director Karen Strickland.
Q. Did (driver Linda Moore) let Eric Martin off at the right stop?
A. She let the child off at the stop that he said was his stop.
Q. Did she let him off at his designated stop?
A. Ms. Moore didn't know what his designated stop was. ... There was no record to show his designated stop.
Q. So apparently he should still be on the bus to this day?
A. She let the child off at the stop that the child said that that's where he lived.
From the deposition of bus driver Linda Moore.
Q. What did you do next? (after speaking with a supervisor about a missing child.)
A. I just sat by the phone. I mean, I was just wondering had they found the child. And they finally called me back and told me they found him.
Q. And what did they tell you?
A. They told me that they did find him and that he was dead.
Q. What did you do next?
A. Well, I closed my eyes and I fell against the wall. And I just said, "No."
Q. Did you go back at that point and try to reflect on what had happened and the events?
A. Well, all I could do is just try to figure out who they was talking about. I just kept trying to figure out who they was talking about. And that's the only thing I could think of, who was this kid? That's all I can do.
Martin's attorney was able to establish that Moore didn't know who was on her bus that first day after the tutoring class. Or where they were supposed to get off. She collected student information cards from most of the students, but Eric Martin got off the bus without turning one in.
* * *
Eric Martin was a big kid for his age. The medical records said that he was 5'8" and 138 pounds. He also had a slight learning disability.
"He was a child who needed supervision," Martin said. "In our society today, that's disabled."
Eric took Ritalin, a medication that helps kids deal with hyperactivity. In addition, he was seeing a speech and hearing counselor.
After the tutoring class, Eric and the other students went home for the first time on a new bus with a different driver.
Kimberly Martin and her husband David Martin both called the school that day to make sure Eric would be able to get home. He was to be dropped off about 6:20 p.m. at a stop just a short walk from his home.
Eric, his body draining from the Ritalin that helped him stay focused, stayed on the bus until it reached a stop in VillaRosa, five miles from his home.
That's where he got off and started walking. According to court documents, Moore asked Eric if it was the right stop and he indicated it was. He even pointed to a row of nearby houses, so Moore drove off.
Eric made it about 3 miles trudging along busy Lutz-Lake Fern Road before a Dodge Ram, driven by University of South Florida student Christine Matanane, hit him. Matanane said she tried to avoid the boy but couldn't. It was about 7:25 p.m., 40 minutes after sunset. Eric's parents had been driving all over looking for him.
A little after 9 p.m. sheriff's deputies delivered the news to Kimberly Martin. She knew why they were there before they said a word.
* * *
Every day, the school district transports 89,492 children between home and school. That's more than three times the 27,000 passengers who use HARTline every day. More than the 76,000 motorists who use the Veterans Expressway.
With that many daily riders and a 184-day school year, mistakes are bound to happen. Typically, they occur in the first few days of school, when routines are still in flux; or in Eric Martin's case, when something like an after-school tutoring program shakes up the pattern.
Heather Phelps contacted the St. Petersburg Times in August complaining about a scare her 5-year-old daughter had when she was dropped at the wrong bus stop on the second day of school.
"I was waiting for her to get off the bus, and she didn't get off," Phelps said. "I asked the bus driver, "Where is my daughter?' And she said she left her off at the other bus stop. I said, "Why did you leave a 5-year-old off at another bus stop?' And she said, "Well, I tried to stop her."'
Phelps said she and other parents searched for her daughter for 90 minutes before she was found.
"Now that she's found, everyone thinks everything is okay," Phelps said. "And everything is not okay. It should have never happened."
Martin's point exactly.
"I'm not finished yet," Martin said. She said she'd like to see a bar coding system put in place that would register when a child gets on and off a bus, and alerts the driver whether it's the correct bus stop.
"They've got the technology now," she said. "It's got the capability to tell the bus driver that someone's gotten on the bus but hasn't gotten off yet. It would eliminate the human error aspect."
Martin said she's even spoken with the vice president of sales for a company called Advanced Bar Code Technology in Great Neck, N.Y., and learned such a system would cost about $2,000 per bus.
She writes letters to legislators and school district officials, but nothing changes.
"There's nothing being done," Martin said. "The state says it's a local issue, and nobody locally is doing anything. It's appalling, as many times as I've heard about children being lost. There's something drastically wrong with the system."
The Martins marked the third anniversary of Eric's death last week, three days before Halloween, three after the conclusion of National School Bus Safety Week.
-- Logan D. Mabe can be reached at 269-5304 or at mabe@sptimes.com.
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