Video Captures Illinois School Bus Driver Drinking Beer With Children Onboard
School bus drivers have the distinct honor of driving America's youth back and forth to school, and they should use every precaution necessary when given that job. However, some people don't recognize the importance of being in their right frame of mind when completing this task. And unfortunately, there have been far too many incidents involving school bus drivers and our children that could have been avoided had the drivers used a bit more common sense. Which in this day and age is fleeting.
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Though our nation tends to continuously talk about the issues within our current tumultuous political sphere nobody ever talks about the dangers affecting our children. True, how our country is being run affects everyone in every age range, but when it comes to things that should be discussed the mortality rate of school bus incidents never gets brought into the conversation. And apparently it's something that's been on the rise for quite some time, according to the website Injury Facts.
A school bus-related crash is defined by NHTSA as any crash in which a vehicle, regardless of body design, used as a school bus is directly or indirectly involved. This includes incidents involving school children getting in or out of a vehicle. From 2009 to 2018, about 70% of the deaths in school bus-related crashes were occupants of vehicles other than the school bus, and 17% were pedestrians. About 5% were school bus passengers, 4% were school bus drivers, and 2% were pedal cyclists.
Of the people injured in school bus-related crashes from 2007 to 2016, about 35% were school bus passengers, 8% were school bus drivers, and 50% were occupants of other vehicles. The remainder were pedestrians, pedal cyclists, and other or unknown.
One factor that hasn't been discussed which may be a leading cause for the accidents is the quality of employees selected to drive our children around because Fox News reports a female bus driver in Illinois put all of her passengers lives in danger when she decided to drink a beer while driving them home for school.
Michelle Passley, 44, had stopped at a gas station convenience store during her morning route on Nov. 15 and appeared to purchase two cans of beer before getting back on the bus, the Aurora Police Department said Tuesday.
Passley decided to begin chugging the beer while driving the children around, though thankfully the store clerk tipped off the company she works for, First Student Bus Company, and they alerted authorities. Passley was charged with two counts of endangering the life/health of a child and is due back in court on December 27th.
