A local parent is concerned about children overheating on local school buses and confronted the Walton County Board of Education on the subject last Tuesday.
Joelle Burns has two children in the Walton County School District and said she’s increasingly worried about how warm they get on the school bus, which like most buses in the school system, is not air conditioned.
Burns presented her concerns to the WCBOE at its regular monthly meeting last week during the visitor comments portion of the meeting.
“I love our schools and I love our kids,” Burns said. “I would like to address the safety of our kids sitting on overheated buses.”
Burns said she’d been worried about her children, ages 5 and 7, getting off the bus on especially warm days.
She decided to document their condition after getting off the bus on a day with a high of 94 degrees and a heat index of 101 degrees.
“I took their temperatures getting off the bus, my 5-year-old had a temperature of 104.5 and my 7-year-old has a temperature or 100.1,” Burns said. “This is endangering our children.”
Burns said it was against the law to leave a child locked in a hot car, yet the buses were in their own ways just as dangerous.
The windows, which can only be lowered partway for safety reasons, produce only minimal air flow, she said, which can produce dangerous conditions for even the bus drivers.
She did a similar drive, spending 30 minutes driving in her own car without the air conditioner on and with only the window cracked and said she had several symptoms of potential heat exhaustion at the end, including elevated heart rate and elevated blood pressure.
“I challenge the board members to take a ride-along on any afternoon bus ride,” Burns said. “They should discover what it’s like.”
In fact, Superintendent Chip Underwood and Assistant Superintendent Brad Boleman rode buses the next afternoon to get a feel for the current heat situation. Underwood boarded a bus at Monroe Elementary School and Boleman started at Atha Road Elementary School and completed the entire routes.
According to the district, Underwood recorded the internal temperature of the bus at different intervals during the ride. He recorded temperatures that hovered around 89 to 91 degrees. His body temperature remained consistent and never rose above an average body temperature of 98.6 degrees, although he acknowledged that outside temperatures on Wednesday were around 5 degrees lower than in previous weeks.
“Overall, it was a comfortable bus ride,” Underwood said. “I am glad I was able to take part in the ride to understand better what our bus drivers and students experience daily.”
He also said he was highly impressed with the driver and his interaction with the children on his bus.
“The most impressive and enjoyable part of my ride was seeing Mr. Ron interact with the students,” Underwood said. “He knew every child by name and told each child to ‘have a good afternoon’ as they were departing the bus and that he would see them tomorrow. To see such care taken for our students makes me proud to be a part of such an amazing team.”
The WDSD also issued a statement about the current condition of the bus fleet and how air conditioning is handled on such buses.
“The Walton County School District maintains 190 buses, 39 of which have air conditioning, and those buses serve our special needs population,” the statement read. “The initiative to move to air-conditioned buses is a recent phenomenon in the state of Georgia, with approximately 50-60% of the buses in the state having air conditioning.
“Options for conditioned buses are being investigated to determine the most efficient way to incorporate more air-conditioned buses into our fleet.”
Burns said action needs to be taken, and soon.
“We need air conditioning on our buses,” Burns said
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