NBC CT investigation finds school bus and van drivers violating rules of the road

A school van going over 70 miles per hour on Route 9 near Middletown, with students on board…

A school bus pressing to beat a stoplight on a local street in Newington…

We caught these incidents on camera with Go Pros and dashcams.

These vehicles carry students - our most precious cargo.

While it has been a while since we’ve had a deadly school bus crash like the one in Hartford in 2010, they can and do happen, leaving students traumatized. 

Here’s what one of the students in that crash told us in the days following the incident:  “I was thrown under the seats and I couldn’t get back up…I tried to put my hand up on the seat…but I couldn’t feel my hand.”

While that incident was not due to bus driver error, some of the driving we witnessed - like a school van shooting the gap on Interstate 84 in front of a tour bus - makes you wonder if it’s just a matter of time before there’s another serious incident.

We showed the video we have been collecting to Jean Cronin, executive director of the Connecticut School Transportation Association, or COSTA, for its assessment.

“That is not acceptable. That is not how they're trained,” Cronin said.

COSTA represents school bus companies and school systems providing their own student transportation.

“Report it to the bus company. I mean, our companies want to know about this, they want to be able to talk to that driver, retrain that driver and make sure that it doesn't happen again,” Cronin said.

Bus companies, or the state, could require more training to encourage better driving habits.

Right now, COSTA admits Connecticut school bus drivers get on the road with less classroom and behind the wheel time than people driving similarly sized vehicles. But COSTA adds more training is not the answer.

The organization already offers the initial 10-hour course that Connecticut school bus drivers must obtain to get the state's "V" passenger endorsement that is required, and more.

“We have annual retraining. We have a mandatory six hours of safety training every year for all bus drivers. Many of your larger companies will do much more than that. They will be doing on the road training, they'll be having monthly safety training meetings for their drivers,” Cronin said.

Plus, companies are already facing a school bus driver shortage and more training could discourage an already small pool of candidates from applying.

One way to possibly increase that candidate pool could be school bus driver pay. ZipRecruiter has Connecticut in the middle of the pack in the U.S., at $19 an hour.

“That's a question of the school bus contracts and the municipal towns and what they can afford to pay in a contract,” Cronin said.

There have been 7,900 school bus accidents in Connecticut, both major and minor, since 2015.

But on the positive side, most of the crashes are minor, and year-to-year levels have not shown a marked increase, according to Eric Jackson, executive director of the Connecticut Transportation Safety Research Center at UConn.

“Roughly 83% of those bus crashes, there's no injury involved. It's just property damage only. And then maybe we have 13%, where there's actually an injury and a very, very, very few of those actually have fatalities involved,” Jackson said.

There were also some interesting takeaways from other data shared by the Connecticut Transportation Safety Research Center.

It compiled school bus data in Connecticut since Jan. 1, 2015 and found:

• 7,899 school bus crashes
• 17 bus drivers ran red lights
• 18 disregarded a traffic sign
• 50 had a driver action of Operated Motor Vehicle in Inattentive, Careless, Negligent or Erratic Manner
• 36 were arrested or issued a summons to appear
• 270 were issued an infraction
• 8 cases of operating or talking on an electronic device (Note: The center warns these fields are known to not be extremely accurate since it’s hard for an officer to prove or investigate distraction)
• 53 school bus drivers were told they were speeding or driving too fast for the conditions
• 7 drivers were found by law enforcement to have been racing their school buses

While this data may not have a long-term upward trend as of yet, state researchers are again looking at the possibility of seatbelts on school buses.

If you would like to see more data on school bus crashes in Connecticut, click here.