Bullying on school buses can be hard to track

Driving a school bus means keeping your eyes on the road and somehow managing to monitor students inside the bus. But who is keeping their eyes on what happens once bad bus behavior, like bullying, is reported?

Incidents of bullying are happening on Eastern Iowa school buses. But how often is really anyone's guess.

Under the Safe Schools Law, Iowa school districts are required to monitor incidences of harassment and bullying. Prior to the current school year, state bullying data did not account for where the confrontations took place. The Iowa Department of Education recently unveiled its new system to track bullying and harassment reports, which includes collecting incident locations, designed to be more accurate than previous methods.

Bob Pruess can attest that bullying on school buses has been a problem for decades. He was still so affected by what he witnessed during his years as a substitute bus driver for the Tipton Community School District that he spoke at a Sept. 10 Tipton Board of Education meeting in support of local bullying victims and their families.

More than 20 years ago, when Pruess was last at the wheel, bullying on the bus was a "kind of frequent" occurrence.

“It wasn't every day," the retired bus driver said. "It happened on several different routes that I was driving on.”

When students would threaten each other, verbally and physically, Pruess said he would pull over, separate the students and report the incident to the school's principal. Yet he didn't feel supported by school administrators and eventually got fed up.

“That was the day I walked out," Pruess said. "If you couldn't get any support for discipline on the school bus from the superintendent or principal, I wasn't going to sit around and drive.”

Tracking and discipline

One system, present in Tipton and the Iowa City Community School District, is to have bus drivers fill out reports for behavioral incidents -- bullying and otherwise -- and then report them to the building principal. Tipton's student behavior policy does not distinguish between buses and other district areas. Iowa City, however, has a specific set of rules and consequences for bus misconduct. In both districts, those incidents are not tracked at a district level. Once a student violates the rules, the principal follows up. The effectiveness of these systems is up for debate.

“I would tell the school and not much would be done, not much at all," remembered Kara Robinson, a Tipton mother of three, whose son Bryon, a Tipton High School sophomore, was regularly bullied on his bus as a sixth-grader. "There were a few times where I threw my hands up and said, 'I don't know what to do. I don't know what to do because I've done everything I can and nothing gets done.'”

The name calling, teasing and pushing that were part of Bryon's daily life at school and followed him onto the school bus, eventually became too much. Along with her mother, Robinson made the decision to remove Bryon from the bus.

"My mom and I decided that it was nonsense," she said. "We were both tired of it."

One issue complicating Bryon's situation is that he would sometimes not report the torment. Another issue is that of attention. After all, the bus driver -- who is often the only disciplinarian available -- has to focus most on safely driving the vehicle. Also abetting bus bullying is the student perception that the bus is somehow not school and thus not governed by the same rules.

“Probably the most unique thing about bus challenges is it is after school," said Dick Grimoskas, superintendent of Tipton schools. "It is not in a structured classroom … That can make a great challenge.”

Durham School Services provides busing for Iowa City schools. General Manager Fred Grems said drivers are trained to handle behavioral issues on the buses. The company does keep records of behavioral incidents but those are referred to an ultimately dealt with by school administrators.

The picture is slightly different in the College Community School District, which provides its own busing and monitors behavioral issues districtwide. Bus drivers are the first line of intervention when it comes to behavior, but they get to decide when to involve Scott Grabe, the district's director of transportation, and those are the incidents that get tracked. That means single offenses, in which a student complies after the driver intervenes, do not usually get reported.

"I allow the drivers to set the temperament of their bus when it comes to discipline and they're very good at it," Grabe said. "They know how to handle these types of situations."

Grabe then handles the discipline, notifying building principals but working "independently" of them. In his monitoring, Grabe does not differentiate between the nature of the incidents, though he did call bullying a "significant" part of bus behavioral issues. When it arises, there is a separate set of safeguards in place to deal with it.

“We categorize bullying and bullying gets reported," he said. "I don't separate them but the building does.”

In compliance with the Safe Schools Law, bullying on the bus is then reported to the state. Grabe's attitude points to what may be the highest hurdle of all in quantifying and addressing bullying issues on school buses.

“One of the things that I'm careful about is who is defining what bullying is," he said. “We have a very, very specific definition of what bullying is and how we report what bullying is and that doesn't always match up to what other people think bullying is ... What we have to use as our reporting standard is very specific.”

The first round of preliminary bullying and harassment data from the state department of education is set to come out in January 2013, and parents may have to wait until then to find out what's really happening on their students' school buses. At least one Tipton mom has an idea.

“I used to ride the bus too so I know that the bus is a little more lax than school," Robinson said. "You can get away with a little bit more."