Children with special needs succeed when there is structure in teaching and in management of behavior. Knowledge, skill levels, attentiveness, independence and maturity all tend to grow when special needs students know exactly what is expected of them. It is also vital to have continuity between parents and school so that nothing is lost at home that has been gained in the classroom, and vice versa.
But perhaps not as much thought is given to the importance of maintaining structure in the hours special needs students spend in their travels to and from school. In many respects, the school bus is a classroom too. Like teachers, the bus drivers and their aides must get to know who is in their seats. They come to understand how to talk to them, how to help them, how to calm them, how to make them comfortable during the ride — even down-to-the-minute detail of how to best buckle them into their seats. What worked today is going to work tomorrow, so they, like teachers and parents, don’t vary their approach.
So we fully understand why parents of special needs students in School District U46 are not happy about a proposal to shift many bus routes to an outside provider. This would be a hard change for special education students to make. Just ask Sarah Hamilton, whose 10-year-old son, Cole, is on the autism spectrum.
“I cannot fathom how his anxiety level would spike with the possibility of not having a consistent driver and assistant on his bus,” she wrote in a letter to the school board. “This doesn’t set him up for a good day at school.”
Still, it’s not entirely fair to believe that outside school bus companies are not qualified to transport special education students. These companies have drivers and aides who have been on the bus with special need students for years. They know what to do and what not to do, and parents are comfortable with them. The school district might want to invite these parents to a meeting to explain their experiences with outsourced school busing.
The real problem, though, with U46’s proposal is that students who are comfortable with the drivers and aides they now have would be suddenly thrust into a new busing routine. That could be a tough break-in period. It’s not hard to imagine setbacks in behavior that would carry over into the classroom.
And would U46 have any say in whom to hire and, more importantly, to fire? What happens when parents and teachers complain about the unacceptable conduct of a bus driver? It’s a lot harder to get a bad driver off the road when you have to depend on an outside personnel office to do that. U46 also has the ability to put its bus drivers in the best possible position to succeed by doing its own, tailored training. Does it really want to relinquish this to an outside company?
While there are likely economic benefits to outsourcing transportation that taxpayers would appreciate, the school district needs to take care that it doesn’t get carried away by savings to the detriment of its students — particularly those who stand to be hurt most by such a huge change.
