“It scares us to death”: School bus drivers get paddle cams for rogue drivers

Student safety is a priority concern for teachers, families, administrators — and even school bus drivers.

Mark Hazen, the director of transportation with the Bellevue School District (BSD), is deeply concerned for the safety of the students he and the other school bus drivers pick up and drop off every day.

With more people moving to Bellevue, traffic is also increasing and more drivers are neglecting to stop when a school bus puts out its stop paddle.

“It is terrifying when a car flies by and you’re loading kids in and you’re like, ‘Whoa, that was close!’” Hazen said. “It scares us to death.”

BSD bus drivers approached the district with their concerns and said they wanted to find a way to better ensure student safety.

Bus paddle cameras will be installed on 27 BSD school buses in October. The high-resolution cameras will be attached to the exterior of the school buses and will detect vehicles that pass when the bus’s stop paddle is extended. The cameras record an image and video of the passing vehicle’s license plate as well as the extended paddle.

Drivers who do not observe the paddle will receive a $419 ticket from King County District Court.

Five other Washington school districts have implemented school bus paddle cameras including the Seattle School District and Bethel School District.

Melissa deVita, the deputy superintendent of finance and operations for BSD, said the cameras will be on 20 percent of the district’s buses.

“We’ll have them on 27 buses and they’re available to various drivers depending upon the needs on their routes,” deVita said. “There are some routes [where we] have more violators than others depending upon the roads they are going down, so we’ll put them on the highest need routes.”

Different bus drivers will be able to drive these camera buses depending on what’s going on in their route and what they’re observing.

“They won’t be on just 27 specific routes. Maybe one driver needs it for the first two weeks and then another driver might need it,” deVita said.

The goal is to keep students safe and not rack up violations, according to Hazen. The paddle camera routes will typically run through residential neighborhoods instead of downtown Bellevue streets.

“We can put it up by Microsoft or put it in downtown Bellevue where there’s so much traffic and we know we would get tons of violations there, but those aren’t the ones we’re as concerned about because we normally don’t cross students [there,]” Hazen said. “When you go into a residential neighborhood, cars are flying by the bus and kids cross there. So, the whole goal of this is not to get the violations, it’s to gain the safety of the students.”

BSD ran a pilot last October with two paddle cameras on two buses for nine weeks. Within those nine weeks, there were 118 violations. deVita said the high number of violations most likely stems from a lack of knowledge of bus paddle traffic rules.

“I don’t think any of our citizens would willingly put kids at risk. I really think it’s a lack of knowledge of what the rules are and when you should stop and when you don’t,” she said.

The bus paddle cameras will be installed Oct. 8. There will be a short courtesy period where any violators will receive a warning instead of a ticket. The official date the paddle cameras will go into effect is yet to be determined.

deVita predicts the violation rate will be high at the beginning, but will curtail quickly as more drivers understand the bus paddle traffic rules.

“Our hope is that we get the information out so they don’t start high, but if they do, people do learn pretty quickly and it does generally drop down,” she said.

The $419 fines will go toward covering the district’s cost to install the cameras. The fines also will cover King County’s cost to prosecute. Any money that’s left, the company that supplies the paddle cameras will receive a small portion. Any money that’s left after that, the district will put those funds toward student safety.

“We don’t look at it as a money-maker, we just hope it breaks even as it has for these other school districts,” deVita said.

The paddle cameras will give bus drivers “a little bit of assurance” that the students will be safe getting on and off the bus, Hazen said.

“[Bus drivers] see cars fly by the bus when there are kids out there and it scares them to death. This will help assure them that maybe the public is going to get the message, and they’ll slow down when they see the bus paddle out,” he said.