Around 80 million students across India begin their day with a ride in a school bus everyday, putting their safety in the hands of school bus drivers. From ensuring safe driving to handling emergencies, they hold the responsibility of being heedful about child’s security. That is why, training bus drivers to be attentive, caring, and responsive is an imperative job that every school administration should take into consideration.

One of the various aspects that can be covered in training bus drivers is to edify them about handling emergencies. While transposing the child from home to school and vice versa, it is likely to be troubled on the way (say, due to curfew, fire, injury to a child etc.). No matter what the reason is, a response on time is mandatory to ensure that the children in the bus are safe.

Here, we share a few tips that school administration should consider to guide their bus drivers in context to emergency handling.

1. Giving First-Aid to Children, if Needed

A child might suffer from a chronic disease and might require emergency medical assistance, very often. It is important to keep the drivers informed and updated about such kids and the kind of medication that they require.

Bus drivers should be guided to use the first-aid kit. For any physical injury, drivers should be taught to give first-aid to the kids, before any professional help reaches them.

2. Keeping them Informed about Students

School bus drivers should have contact information for every kid to inform their parents about emergency situation. This should include name of the student, emergency contact number (with an alternate number), and name of person to be contacted.

3. Awareness about Routes and Regulations

School authorities should create a set of rules to be followed by the drivers. For example: Updating availability of child as per their presence in school or not leaving the child alone on stand, until any of the guardian arrives.

The routes should be defined beforehand. Also, alternate routes taken in unexpected scenarios like traffic, should also be defined in the list of routes that can be taken by the driver.

4. Updating about any Unusual Phenomenon

The school bus drivers should be taught to keep the school authorities informed about any unusual phenomenon. For example: If the bus is deviated from its normal route, the admin should be able to track that as well. Also, details like location of the bus, the route followed by it etc. are some of the looked after information that schools should update themselves about.

5. Aware them about Emergency Contact Numbers

There should be a list of students containing information about the name, address, emergency contact number, a detailed physical description of the student. This may help to contact parents during the state of emergency. Further, the driver should also be aware of the purpose of emergency contact numbers such as 100, 101, and 102.

Training Drivers to Tackle Emergencies:

While this is impossible manually, schools are preferring to automate this task through bus tracking systems, which keep a track of bus location, its movements, route deviation etc. and keeps the school as well as parents updated about it.

School bus tracking software like Yellow.live are adopted to ascertain safety of kids and ensure parents about the same. Such models of bus monitoring are handy and their facility to continuously update both the ends about child’s whereabout makes them a must-have for every school that aims to have a safe and seamless transportation system.

Yellow.live is a SAAS based, robust product for school bus monitoring. To know more about the software and book a demo at your school, click here.