School Bus Watch

In this recent post I griped that there wasn’t some sort of government-sponsored program to provide training to bus drivers and/or alert them about the rumored terrorist plot to hijack a bunch of school buses in the U.S. and cause mass casualties.

Well, I was wrong! Thanks to the article “Highway Watch: Truckers Standing Guard” by M. Pietrantoni in the current issue of the excellent ModernSurvival.net online magazine, I’ve learned that there is a program with enhanced screening, training and alerts in place for truckers, with a similar program for bus drivers That program is called Highway Watch. (The program for school bus drivers is, of course, School Bus Watch.) Sorry, you have to be a subscriber to read the article, but I’ve posted excerpts below….

Following 9/11, the Department of Transportation … focused on drivers, particularly those with hazardous materials endorsements. Background checks for these drivers have been greatly enhanced. All such drivers must now be cleared by the Department of Homeland Security, DHS, before their hazmat endorsement is issued or renewed.

Something more was needed, and an existing program was reconstituted as an anti-terror device.

The Highway Watch program was initially conceived in 1998 as a road safety initiative primarily aimed at truck drivers. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks however the program was expanded to include all types of transportation professionals.

So far more than 650,000 truck drivers, state departments of transportation workers, local mass transit personnel, highway construction crews, first responders, hazardous materials workers, and others who work in or around the transportation industry have received the specialized training and become certified Highway Watch volunteers.

— “Highway Watch: Truckers Standing Guard”

Beginning in 2004 DHS joined with the American Trucking Association to provide funding for Highway Watch. The program now appears to be well-integrated with state DOTs (it’s mandatory for Georgia truckers, for instance) and includes centralized call centers for participants to phone in reports and for analysis and interagency notification of alerts. It’s even run several successful large-scale multi-agency training exercises using various terrorist scenarios.

The website for Highway Watch is here. Its web page for School Bus Watch is here.
The official website for School Bus Watch is here.

What’s left is enhanced nationwide screening of school bus drivers — to prevent Joe Jihadi from becoming one. Hopefully somebody’s working on that…

In the meantime, googling “Highway Watch” doesn’t bring up many news reports, and many of those seem to be from the tinfoil-hat brigade. This is the kind of successful program — and partnership between government and industry — that should be more widely reported! Here’s one sane and well-balanced article, with a link to an interview of the program’s departing Director.

And kudos to M. Pietrantoni for an excellent and informative article, and to ModernSurvival magazine for publishing it!

If you don’t read ModernSurvival.net, you should! Click the link to see sample articles and subscribe!