PORTLAND, Maine – There have been three crashes in the last week involving Maine school buses.
In Maine, four out of five students take the bus to school.
School districts all say getting them there safely is a top priority, but there have been 90 crashes involving school buses this calendar year, including 10 that made headlines.
Since 2017, school buses in Maine have been involved in nearly 600 crashes.
There have been 90 crashes involving school buses in 2022 alone.
Most are minor crashes, but a week ago, one crash led to the death of 18-year-old Casey Southworth, when his motorcycle crashed into the back of a Windham school bus in Gorham.
“It’s a tragic event,” Windham-Raymond Superintendent Chris Howell said. “And we definitely feel for everyone involved.”
Despite three crashes this past week involving school buses, statistically in Maine, school buses are involved in only 0.002 percent of the total number of crashes in the state.
“School buses are the safest form of transportation for students to get to school,” Lisa Gadway with the Maine Association for Pupil Transportation said.
Gadway is the president of the Maine Association for Pupil Transportation and transportation director for the Mt. Ararat school district in Topsham.
“There’s always the potential for an accident happening,” Gadway said.
In March, one of her drivers, 77-year-old Arthur McDougall, suffered a medical event while driving a bus before a student on the bus took the wheel and pulled it off the road.
McDougall was the only fatality of someone on a school bus in Maine this year.
Two other bus crashes this year also involved drivers suffering a medical event: one in Boothbay in April and one in Mexico in June.
With a limited number of new bus drivers, Gadway says school districts throughout Maine are dependent on their older drivers to run the bus routes.
“We are dependent on anybody who can drive a bus. And we don’t want age to be that limit,” Gadway said. “Really, it is dependent on whether or not they can pass a physical, which they have to pass annually.”
One school transportation employee says young adults are not interested in becoming a school bus driver.
Many districts do extra training with drivers on how to handle situations that may come up behind the wheel to help them avoid accidents.
