are our children safe on the bus?

Each morning as I am taking my two youngest to school we stop by a gas station so that the kids can get a snack for school. This gas station sits on the side of a very busy highway that we have to cross and you wouldn't believe the stuff that we see during this stop, this morning I was pulling out of the stores parking lot and watched a school bus come barreling down the highway, full of children mind you, and drove right through a red light. The bus driver was barely honking the horn to let the drivers crossing who now had the green light know that he/she wasn't stopping at the RED light. All I could think to myself was that God must have had his hand on that bus protecting those children because other wise there would have been a devastating accident. The bus was going so fast that I couldn't even get the number off of it to call in and report this incident, and folks wonder why my children do not ride the bus in the morning. I want to know where the school systems are hiring these wreckless drivers at, what are the requirements to driving a bus and is it going to take a near fatal and or fatal wreck to get the idiot drivers off of the buses our children are on? Don't get me wrong, I am not saying that all of our bus drivers are bad but I think that our county needs to check them out a little more before they give them the go ahead on driving a bus.

All of this has had my mind going in all directions, one thought I had was that normally when a bus is involved in a wreck the population always thinks it is the driver of the other vehicle that was at fault but I am wondering how many times the fault was on the bus driver and how many times that detail has been covered up to keep counties from being sued. My two youngest ride the bus home because there is no way I can be at the elementary school to pick my son up at 2:45 then turn around and pick my daughter up at the middle school, which is about two miles away, by 3:15. I don't have two hours to wait in line at schools to pick my kids up so they ride the bus home and both of their bus drivers have been driving for our county for years and years, as a matter of fact my daughters bus driver was my bus driver when I was in high school, he had just started...he was a great driver then and he is a great driver now and my favorite thing about him is he treats the children on his bus as if they were his kids/grandkids.

When I was in 7th grade we went on a field trip to see a play in Knoxville, there were three buses and our driver was a woman I had never saw before. On our way back just a couple of miles from the theater our driver was talking on her CB, not paying attention and rear-ended the bus in front of us, a lot of us ended up with minor injuries from that wreck including a handicapped girl that was sitting on the back of the bus we hit. Our driver kept saying she didn't know what happened, the brakes had failed...yada yada.., after the investigation not only on the brakes but the entire bus, they concluded that she wasn't paying attention so she was given a warning and had to have another adult that worked in the school system ride with her for x amount of time. It wasn't even a month later this driver had another at fault rear-end wreck and that was the end of her in our county.

I think it is absolutely terrible when you put your kids on a bus and you don't know if the driver can be trusted. As I said previously, I trust my kids' bus drivers and if I didn't then I would sit and wait for however long I had to to keep them off the bus.

I know this post is boring but these are the thoughts going through my mind this morning so I will ask all of you to tell your bus stories about bad drivers..etc...if you have any.

Y'all have a good day, be safe and stay warm! :)