Stop for school bus or you could be ticketed; school district kicks off safety week

KELOWNA — An annual event aimed at reminding both drivers, students and bus drivers of the importance of safety with school buses kicked off in Kelowna on Monday.

The Central Okanagan School District launched School Bus Safety Week with this year’s theme: ‘Stop on Red!”.

Every September, students in grades one to three are taught about school bus safety through a special program called “The ABC’s of School Bus Safety”.

The school district says the idea is to foster conscientious, safety-minded school bus passengers.

However, the safety message goes beyond the students on the buses, it’s also a time to remind drivers about how to avoid dangerous situations involving school buses and children.

“As a bus driver, it’s very frustrating and I sometimes don’t understand why [drivers] can’t sometimes see a big yellow bus and all these flashing red lights and they continue to just blatantly run through the red lights,” says Barry Marciski, who has been a bus driver for the school district for 14 years.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "As a bus driver, it's very frustrating and I sometimes don't understand why [drivers] can't sometimes see a big yellow bus and all these flashing red lights and they continue to just blatantly run through the red lights," says Barry Marciski, who has been a bus driver for the school district for 14 years.

Cst. Steve Holmes with Kelowna RCMP’s Municipal Traffic Unit says close to 200 tickets are issued every year in the city to the owners of vehicles which failed to stop when a school bus extended a stop sign and turned on its red stop lights.

“Each time a car ignores these lights and this sign, they’re basically creating an opportunity for potential tragedy because if they hit a child or run a child over, then these excuses of ‘I didn’t see it or I didn’t know’ aren’t going to help,” says Holmes.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "Each time a car ignores these lights and this sign, they're basically creating an opportunity for potential tragedy because if they hit a child or run a child over, then these excuses of 'I didn't see it or I didn't know' aren't going to help," says Holmes.

Holmes says bus drivers file complaints to the RCMP when vehicles fail to stop and when enough information is presented to police to write a violation ticket, an officer will show up at the home of the registered owner of the vehicle and hand over a $167 ticket.

That means, even if the registered owner of the vehicle wasn’t the one driving the car at the time of the failed stop, they could still be the one faced with the fine.

“Unless they are willing to name the driver and bring that forward, then we can give the ticket to the driver instead,” says Holmes.

Holmes is reminding drivers that it’s not just vehicles behind a school bus with red lights and a stop sign out that are required to stop, the same rules apply to oncoming traffic.

“People need to realize that the only reason that the school bus driver is going to put these lights on is when you have an active loading and unloading situation where children are either going to be crossing the lanes of traffic to get on that bus or will be leaving the bus and crossing lanes of traffic,” says Holmes.

Tweet This Click to share quote on Twitter: "People need to realize that the only reason that the school bus driver is going to put these lights on is when you have an active loading and unloading situation where children are either going to be crossing the lanes of traffic to get on that bus or will be leaving the bus and crossing lanes of traffic," says Holmes.

Drivers are required to remain stopped for a school bus with flashing amber lights until the bus moves on or the driver signals that it’s safe to proceed.

~ With files from Kelly Hayes