Running a school bus stop sign? District hoping new cameras will reduce numbers of violations, citations
The three cameras are located at the front of themes, on the side and at the rear to capture images of drivers running the stop sign extended from the driver’s side of the school bus. (John Mueller photo)
When a school bus driver opens the door to the bus, allowing children to disembark, the bus driver expects an oncoming vehicle to obey the stop sign extended from the bus. Because the bus driver’s attention is focused on the children. The information needed to punish the offending driver is most oftentimes gone in an instant. But a grant from the Minnesota Department of Public Safety will help hold the offending drivers accountable. A $119,836 school bus stop arm grant New Prague Area Schools received will provide a clear image of the license plate of the vehicle driven through the stop arm.
The district’s 41 yellow school busses are now equipped with three cameras each. The new cameras record oncoming passengers from the front of the bus and from two angles on the side of the bus where the stop arm is extended, said Tim Dvorak, the lead mechanic for NPAS’s transportation department who coordinated the grant initiative.
The district received the grant earlier this year. Its transportation maintenance staff spent the summer installing the three cameras on each bus – one inside the windshield pointing forward, the second below the stop arm facing the rear of the bus to record oncoming vehicles and the third at the top of the back of the driver’s side of the bus facing forward.
New Prague Police Department School Resource Officer Zak Ambroz said in an era of distracted driving, bus drivers are expected to be responsible for the safety of students on the bus. But they can’t focus on drivers and the students they are transporting, he said in a letter to the Minnesota Department of Public Safety accompanying the school district’s grant application.
The cameras are recording during each bus’s route. When the bus returns to the base, within range of the school district’s Wi-Fi, recorded violations are sent to the office and forwarded to the appropriate law enforcement for consideration of a citation and legal charges via the appropriate county attorney’s office. Fines for violating state law governing school bus...
To see more on this story pick up the october 27, 2022 print edition of The New Prague Times.
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