If you’re a parent in North Carolina and you’re thinking of sending your child to a charter school, WBTV in Charlotte discovered a loophole in state law that may give you second thoughts. Incredibly, charter schools in my home state aren’t required to inspect their buses.
Public school buses in North Carolina must be inspected every 30 days. In contrast, buses operated by charter schools have no such requirement. For that matter, they don’t have any of the standardized maintenance requirements of public school buses. This is because charter school operators aren’t obligated to provide transportation at all, though they are required to ensure that transportation issues don’t keep kids from attending.
Charter schools can request a free inspection of their school buses by the North Carolina Department of Public Instruction’s transportation division once a year. WBTV discovered that of the 35 charter schools operating in Charlotte and the surrounding counties, only two requested inspections during the 2014-15 school year. The results are absolutely frightening. Watch here.
One of them was Sugar Creek Charter School in Charlotte. In July, a courtesy inspection found ten buses had problems so severe that they had to be taken off the road immediately. The inspection report makes for horrifying reading. Among the issues found on the buses were worn brakes, broken mirrors, damaged emergency exit door handles, missing first aid kits, broken headlights, broken tail lights, and oil leaks. State inspector Randy Henson told school principal Cheryl Turner that things had actually gotten worse since he’d inspected Sugar Creek’s fleet a year earlier.
Despite this, Turner said that the issues found by the state were “not on our radar” because the buses were regularly inspected by the manufacturer, Thomas Built Buses. According to Turner, the North Carolina inspection report indicated that the state has different safety standards for school buses than Thomas does. Even though several of the issues that were red-flagged by the July inspection would have been serious enough by themselves to take the buses out of service, Turner said–with a straight face–that these issues were “not things that were so unsafe I would not put children on it.”
Turner decided to have her school buses inspected on a monthly basis, at an additional cost of $1,500 per month. Despite this, another courtesy inspection in January revealed several disturbing red flags–missing crossing arms and first aid kits, worn tires, and malfunctioning safety buzzers for emergency exits. The obvious question–how long had some of these buses been on the road before they were red-flagged?
Derek Graham, the head of transportation for the Department of Public Instruction, told WBTV that “there’s a lot of inherent safety for kids” traveling on a school bus. Those words seem rather hollow in light of this report. After all, one of the most sacred trusts of sending our kids to school is that they’re going to be kept safe.
I had been undecided on whether charter schools were a good idea. But it seems apparent that North Carolina isn’t willing to implement the most basic oversight to ensure that charter school students are safe–something on which there shouldn’t be a price tag. Considering that this story comes on the heels of another Charlotte charter school being forced to close after only 20 days–in part because its owner knew he was underfinanced and siphoned off money to make car payments–it’s the only plausible conclusion.
A lot of things have gone wrong in North Carolina in the last few years, but this is one thing you can’t blame solely on our current tea-infused General Assembly. The first charter school opened in this state in 1997. However, the GOP now owns this problem–and needs to fix it. Now.
