I was going to make a joke, but this is seriously some fucked up shit.
Batista said that even after notifying the monitor of the issue, the worker just gave the same child a different backpack and once again attempted to send them away with Batista.
“Then the bus monitor… got another backpack, but the same child, and brought him back to me. So again I said, ‘That’s not my child.’”
And then her kid finally gets off the bus and he’s missing his backpack and some clothing and doesn’t seem like himself? Wtf
Wtf, is the bus driver a lunatic? Mid stroke? Like what the hell
Look man, you seen one kid, you seen em all. Just take this thing off my hands so I can get home on time.
Yo I was laughing my ass off at this.
I mean wtf.
Like did they work in fast food?
“Oh my bad, let me bring it back to the cooks (Goes to the back, spins in circles, adds a pickle on it) Here you go.”
Lol it’s ridiculous. What is going through that person’s head. And what the hell are those kids going to remember about it for the rest of their lives?
Insanity
Capitalism, privatization, passing the buck and the race to the bottom. It’s all related.
You don’t get this when schooling - and the associated transportation - is a social service that has been properly set up. There is no profit motive there, no race to the bottom that enshittifies everything involved.
In a well-funded public school system, drivers would be employed by the school system, have appropriate training and meet high standards, and be paid decently well. They would have the time and the incentive to get to know the students and get things right.
It’s all bugfuck. I have a clear memory of waiting on the bell in 2nd grade. When that bell went, the teacher said, “Dismissed.”, and we scattered like cockroaches.
Drop by your locker for whatever you need to swap out, go your way. (Yes, we had lockers and were responsible for making it to class with the appropriate materials, as well as the locks, starting in kindergarten.) You could hit the creek behind the school, walk home, bike home, get in your parent’s car, hop on any bus you chose, whatever.
Between helicopter parents and a waning public education, we’ve spent decades taking away the responsibilities of children, making them goose-step their whole school career, and we wonder what went wrong. Add social-media peer pressure to the mix, no wonder young people are scared to be “different”, step out of line.
I agree with all your points to at least some degree.
However, this kid is 3, and autistic. I can totally understand the alarm and concern.
Definitely. It is quite possible that the child is behind their peers verbally as well, further contributing to the issue.
12 years old I’d walk 1.5 miles home, crossing two major roads on the way. It wasn’t safe, it wasn’t life threatening either. It was about the pace of the life I’d experience for the next 30 years.
Not saying we’ve gone soft on the kids - the world got kinda more fucked up - but like, maybe the pendulum swung too far the other way, ya know?
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Fucking bus company and school needs to be sued into bankruptcy. This shit will keep happening until they feel consequences of their actions.
From what I read in the article, it’s not the school’s fault in any way. The bus company, however, deserves to be sued.
Why da FAQ is there such thing a bus company for public schools
This is what corruption looks like in practice folks
This is pretty normal where I’m from and nothing like this has ever happen near me. Special Need kids have a different bus and the driver assumably has special instructions. Most schools don’t have the space to have a maintenance garage and don’t want to keep a spare bus in case of a breakdown. A bus company that has a hundred busses and keep a few spares off the road for emergencies.
This is less corruption and more unique incompetence.
My guess is budget cuts.
“If we outsource transportation, we’ll be at 125% of our budget instead of 140%…”
But in reality these contracts are know for over runs as grifters under bid and then pile on after government entity is locked in.
Same thing happens in b2b too but once paper is signed and people are emotio invested the guy who made decision essentially protecting bad vendor.
Yeah, the classic under bid, over promise scenario happens constantly, but it works because it looks good on paper which is all the bureaucrats care about.
in software engineering we often say: outsource anything that’s not your core value proposition
basically, don’t take valuable time and effort from the thing you do well and want to focus on to do something that you don’t really care about, that someone else is spending time and effort focusing on doing well. in this situation, managing a load of busses isn’t something the schools should be focusing on: they should focus on education, and getting kids there and home should be the job of someone else specialised in doing that task
Taking care of and keeping track of kids is absolutely within a school’s core value proposition!
sure, but that’s a small part of actual work that’s involved in owning and maintaining a fleet of busses, paying drivers who work only a few hours per day, organising scheduling and routes, etc
That somebody requires profit to do it, school can do this at cost…
Again, theory is decent in practice this is how corruption gets done. It is cute to assume that this company is providing a better service and for cheaper.
Who ever got this contract is giving kick backs and sucking out profit… That’s a lot of overhead in of itself.
“at cost” can sometimes be far more expensive than paying someone else to do it
There are different business models. Some offer turnkey solutions, some focus on core values. Simply for the sake of accountability and additional tasks school buses are used for, it makes sense to keep them under the umbrella of the schools.
None of this advocates running public services like a business.
school busses in australia are never under the control of schools. i understand that our countries are different but its not a universal fact that school busses work the same everywhere
our system works great here
