Yo - School's Started - Don't Honk At The Buses

I'm digressing from political chatter in this post in order to provide a friendly reminder to everyone who traverses through our community on school days: don't honk at the buses while they're picking up kids. Don't drive past the bus on the opposite side while kids are loading. Don't pass the bus while it's stopped.

Check out this rules of the road for encountering school buses quiz. How many questions could you answer?

Here are the two main Ohio laws that govern exactly what a school bus driver must do when picking up children and what you as a driver encountering a school bus must do to for stopped school buses.

A lot of school buses go through Pepper Pike on nearly all if not all our streets, including the main ones of Lander, South Woodland, Shaker, SOM and Fairmount. They are unavoidable if you're out on the roads between 6:30am and as late as 4:30pm.  I know how frustrating it can be when the drivers and the kids and the parents appear to you, as a driver in a stopped car, to be taking "too long." But you have got to trust that there is a reason and that it is almost certainly a reason related to safety - yours and theirs.

This post was triggered by the following incident: This morning, my children's first full day in the Orange schools, much to my enormous disappointment, and in 12 years of having my kids ride the school bus and picked up on South Woodland, for the first time ever, a car leaned on its horn and did not stop until my child's school bus began to pull away from the driveway edge.  It was probably a good 15 seconds of that honk, maybe more.  That is absolutely uncalled for and obviously did not work (if you're honking for more than 5 seconds and the bus isn't moving, do you really think another 10 seconds is going to make a difference?).

It also sends an absolutely horrible message: you couldn't care less about the safety of the kids and are only interested in getting to wherever you're going as quickly as possible. 

For those curious to know why the pick up might have been longer than that driver could stand, the bus driver, who is new this year, called my child back from having sat down in order to give him and me some very specific instructions and information about pick up and timing. She was, what we might call - doing her job.

Seriously, people - it's a gorgeous morning, it's still August, there's a whole weekend before Labor Day.  These kids are going to be in a building for more than six hours just like you're going to be working in some building for x number of hours. Just chill.  Be safe and let the bus drivers do their job and keep the kids, and you, by the way, safe.

If you really need to read up on why these things are so important, check out all the school bus accidents already piling up and injuring kids and adults.