Episode Details

Lacey Paschall:
So you don't have to have any driving experience. You just need to be somebody who loves working with kids, who is passionate about safety, who wants to be a really important part of the community.

Anthony Godfrey:
That sound of the air brakes and the door opening, that's really exciting. And here come the kids.

Lacey Paschall:
There are a lot of kids who we are their only safe ride to and from school.

Anthony Godfrey:
Hello and welcome to The Supercast. I'm your host, Superintendent Anthony Godfrey. Some classrooms on wheels are making their way to kindergarten and first-grade students throughout Jordan School District right now. The classrooms are actually big yellow school buses. On this episode of The Supercast, find out how our dedicated school bus drivers have come up with an entertaining and hands-on training course to keep kids safe on the school bus. Hear how students are loving the lessons which will save student lives.

Anthony Godfrey:
We're here at Copper Canyon Elementary to talk about bus safety with Lacey. Introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your role in Jordan School District.

Lacey Paschall:
I'm Lacey Paschall. I'm a trainer for our Transportation department and I am the coordinator of the Safety in the Schools program. So I do all of the back side of it. I do all the scheduling, contacting all the schools. I schedule all of my drivers. I train all of my drivers on exactly what our expectations are and then I've been out of schools as well this year helping them out.

Anthony Godfrey:
Now most people when they think about school safety, the first thing they think about is not bus safety. But it's really important that students know how to ride the bus safely, board the bus safely, and you start early. You start with kindergarten and first graders to make sure that they are all ready to make the most of their busing experience and to do so safely. So tell us about what the program looks like and how frequently students are trained and all of that.

Lacey Paschall:
That's a great question. So we start with the kindergarten and first grade, like you said, because we want to build that foundation of safety as early as possible. So we train them once a year and we start at the beginning of the year when it's going to be fresh in their minds a little bit better rather than at the end of the year when they're entering into summer. We teach them about the danger zones around the bus. We teach them about watching for their driver's signal, that it's safe to cross, always looking both ways. We make it fun too so that it's not a scary thing. Another thing that we do is we teach them about emergency exit evacuations as well, which if they ride the bus, they do twice a year anyway. But we take them out and we teach them that so that they know that that's not scary either. And all of this is, it's an important thing and safety's cool. We make it really fun and interactive and engaging.

Anthony Godfrey:
So we're talking about getting on the bus safely. We're talking about getting off the bus safely in case of an emergency. Talk to me about the rules of being on the bus safely.

Lacey Paschall:
We actually go over all those with them, too, and a really fun little slide show that I think that the kids like. So we talk about, you know, alw