Do you really know what’s going on in your child’s yellow bus? Vulgar or aggressive drivers, turbulent students out of control, lost children. The newspaper peeled hundreds of complaints related to school transport.
Imagine you drive a bus with 60 children, while receiving small cheese fish on your head. Or denounce an attacker more than 20 times without obtaining any help. This is what helpless drivers experience in front of turbulence problems on board.
“I have seen, men cry,” admits Josée Dubé, who represents some 11,000 bus drivers and school sedans across Quebec.
She gives the example of this driver over 50 who worked at night “thinking about her executioner”, one of the young people in her bus. Or to this other, who said “with the Babine who shake: If they don’t do anything, I put my keys back. “
Throughout the weekend, The newspaper will publish a file on school transport in Quebec. Longue children, intimidation between students, vulgar or dangerous drivers: the list of identified problems and their recurrence are surprising.
The helplessness of the drivers in the face of the turbulence of young people, The newspaper It has detected in several complaints from the hundreds obtained from more than 25 school service centers (CSS).
“The driver is so disgusted that he does not even look anymore [derrière]he lets the camera go. It is day after day hell on this bus. Honestly, it wouldn’t take it big for him to leave, ”reads an email sent to a CSS des Laurentides in February 2024.
«Party»
In some cases, the driver’s lack of authority seems to be involved.
“It doesn’t look like a jungle like that,” said a mother of the Laurentians in her complaint about a bus circuit that turns to “party”.
“The bus comes to the corner of the street […] And we already hear the children shouting […] Young people of 4e5e6e Year have a head out of the windows, ”wrote the parent in April 2024.
But the heart of the problem is often the lack of collaboration with certain school circles, which wrongly consider that their role stops at the bus door.
«Ils [le CSS] told us that they could not do anything if our son was attacked, ”wrote for example a mother from Laval in the fall of 2023.
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“You never see the end”
“It is really with variable geometry from one school and from one CSS to another,” observes Luc Lafrance, president of the transporter federation by bus. “Sometimes follow -up is not necessarily fast or communication is not adequate.”
Carole Laplant is well placed to talk about it. Driver in Montreal for forty years, she sometimes has replaced on the South Shore. And it’s two worlds, she explains.
The Carole Laplant driver in her school bus. The standards make it possible to accommodate up to 72 young people.
Photo Dominique Scali
“On the island of Montreal, it’s Rock’n’Roll. There is clearly a lack of support from CSS, “she says.
In principle, after a third post or warning, a student is supposed to be suspended from school transport. But very often, the school environment does not act.
“You can make around twenty reports on a young person, but you never see the end,” she sighs.
She gives the example of a boy who was sexual touching on a little girl with intellectual disability.
“He was not even suspended. It was the mother of the young person who removed her, ”she deplores.
Some examples of complaints relating to turbulent students
▪ “The driver received a cell phone behind the head!” We can read in a note of event dating from February 2024. —Css des Hautes-Laurentides
▪ Secondary young people exhibited a 10 -year -old child at pornography during the trip, complains a parent. “My boy was also disturbed when he returned home.” —Css of the capital, Quebec
▪ A student “puts her hands in her panties and wins on others.” —Css des Hautes-Laurentides
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