That’s what they always say in cases like this:
Witnesses say that Brendan Houston, a first-grade student at Herndon Magnet School, had alighted the bus in North Highland, a suburb of Shreveport, when he realized his shoe laces had been tied together.
He stopped to fix the laces, but the bus driver, Debra Stevens, didn’t see him and pulled out.
Brendan was rushed to University Health in Shreveport, where he died of his injuries.
‘I heard somebody say, ”Uh oh, oh, oh, oh,” like that,’ Sara Ward, whose house is near where the accident occurred on Winter Garden Drive, told KSLA.
‘Somebody was laying in the road. I thought maybe a child had passed out, or got knocked down.‘
It then became clear it was much more serious.
‘His shoe laces had been tied together and when he got off, you know, he was shuffling and he reached down in front of the bus to untie his shoe laces. She did not see him,’ Ward said.
Ward added: ‘The bus driver was out here (on the grass), right here next to my little bridge just in hysterics, in hysterics.’
Considering the trouble that school buses put everyone else to (by making all traffic stop in both directions), you might think that those placed in control of the bus itself would be, like, extra extra careful.
Perhaps better training and accountability, and above all selection* would be preferable to supplying after-the-fact death counselors.
This is not the first time I’ve heard about school bus problems, and I don’t think it will be the last.
* Any selectivity in hiring is fraught with innumerable legal problems, thanks to the asinine clowns who now run everything. Hiring only drivers with spotless records might be frowned on under the prevailing disparate impact standard.
The country is being ruined in the name of fairness.
But not to worry. Counselors will be on hand!