In December, a school bus swerving out of control flipped on a winding road, and the driver was arrested on charges she was under the influence of multiple prescription drugs.
While it was unusual to have an allegedly intoxicated school bus driver in an injury crash, the fact that a Colorado school bus had been in a wreck was not. Since 2011, school buses have been involved in more than 1,500 crashes in the state, a 9Wants To Know investigation found. That’s an average of two bus crashes a day – every day – during the school year.
That’s surprising, said Rebecca Matheson, whose son was injured in a 2011 crash in Adams County. “It’s scary. It’s very scary.”
And that total doesn’t include numbers for the last half of 2015, when the Durango School District 9-R rollover crash occurred.
“That is school safety,” said state Sen. Linda Newell, D-Littleton. “That’s precious cargo every single day that we have going to and from our schools. So I think we should look at something like that.”
The 9Wants To Know investigation and Rocky Mountain PBS News examined data compiled by the Colorado Department of Transportation on school bus crashes between Jan. 1, 2011, and June 30, 2015. Among the findings:
More than 700 of the 1,500 crashes were deemed to be the fault of the bus drivers.
More than 70 of those crashes resulted in injuries – 377 people were hurt, including children on buses and motorists and passengers in vehicles they smashed into.
Two crashes resulted in the deaths of pedestrians – both older people who were hit by buses, one in Loveland, one in Westminster.
All but one of Colorado’s 178 school districts provide some student bus transportation. According to Jennifer Okes, director of school finance at the Colorado Department of Education, more than 363,000 students ride buses on the average day.
“It is a very safe mode of transportation, but clearly we need to continue to do everything we can to review the procedures and policies and rules so that it gets even safer,” Okes said.
9-R rollover injured 16 students
Two frightening crashes occurred in late 2015.
The first, on Nov. 17, involved a Durango 9-R school bus. A driver who was a week out of training was reaching for a whistle to quiet noisy students when he lost control on Lightner Creek Road (County Road 207), west of Durango. The bus ran down an embankment and rolled, injuring 16 students.
The driver, William Farley, also was injured and was cited with careless driving causing bodily injury. Although new to school bus driving, Farley had held a commercial driver’s licence since 2007 and had no crashes before joining the district, officials said.
Farley remains on unpaid administrative leave with the district, spokeswoman Julie Popp said, and will not be allowed to drive a school bus for the district again after an accident of this severity.
“We have been talking about finding him other work within the district, but no decisions have been made yet,” Popp said.
District 9-R has had 20 incidents in the past five years, mostly fender-benders and when no students were on board.
Driving under the influence
Then came the Dec. 7 crash outside Lyons involving a driver, Elizabeth Burris, who allegedly was under the influence of as many as six prescription drugs and unable to pass a roadside sobriety test. Five of the eight students on her bus were hurt, and Burris suffered minor injuries.
She faces multiple charges – driving under the influence, vehicular assault and eight counts of child abuse.
Corbyn Fillweber, 12, and his brother, Tyler Fillweber, 10, were on the bus that day.
“It just seemed like normal. Until we started swerving,” Corbyn said.
The brothers were not hurt. Their mother, Amanda Archibald, was at her home when a woman said there had been a bus crash on Colorado Highway 7. She contacted the school district and was told immediately that no one had died.
“It’s just that gut-wrenching feeling of everything you can imagine going through your head,” she said. “Like well, that’s OK, it wasn’t fatal, but what did happen, you know?”
Drivers commonly at fault
After those two crashes, 9Wants To Know set out to find out how often school buses get into wrecks.
The investigation focused on the more than 700 crashes in which the school bus drivers were deemed to be at fault. At least one in five of the wrecks was a result of a serious factor affecting the driver. For instance, in 69 cases, a driver who crashed was preoccupied or distracted by passengers, and in 47 crashes, a driver’s inexperience played a major role, according to the data.
Weather conditions accounted for about a quarter of the wrecks.
Buses hitting parked cars accounted for the largest number of wrecks – but the data also showed that rear-end crashes were the source of the most injuries.
That’s what happened in the crash when Matheson’s son, Will, was injured on Oct. 5, 2011. He was 14 at the time and riding on a bus driven by Sheryl Ritchey, a driver for Adams County School District 12 since the mid-1990s.
Ritchey declined a request from 9NEWS for an interview.
According to the Westminster Police Department report, her bus was traveling 46 mph in a 40 mph zone when she slammed into the back of a Mitsubishi Eclipse that was sitting at a red light. The Mitsubishi’s driver, Alan McCrea, saw the bus in his mirror and hit the accelerator – but he was too late.
The collision knocked the Mitsubishi nearly 295 feet – about the length of a football field. McCrea suffered head and neck injuries but recovered.
The bus skidded 64 feet after impact, and Matheson’s son suffered a lip gash and back injuries.
“I got a call from the district, actually, and they said that Will’s bus had been in an accident, so I rushed over. ...” Matheson said. “He was a little banged up.”
She said she was told that the bus had “bumped” a car at a red light. Now, 4½ years later, she doesn’t recall seeing the car, but after she was shown photographs from the scene, she was angry.
“I feel like I didn’t get the whole story from the district, which is obviously a problem,” she said.
Mark Hinson, chief human resource officer for Adams 12 Five Star Schools, said he could not speak to what Matheson was told at the time.
“If the parent believes she was misled, that’s unfortunate, and we certainly wouldn’t want that to be a practice,” he said.
Hinson said the district has drug and alcohol testing requirements and training regimens that exceed requirements and that it takes other steps, such as mandating that drivers check in face to face with a supervisor each day.
“We’re transporting about 8,800 kids a day,” he said. “Our buses will complete somewhere between 1.3 and 1.6 million miles on the road a year. And when you think about traffic conditions, congestion, road conditions, weather conditions, it’s not surprising that there are going to be accidents. Our buses are operated by our bus drivers, and there’s always human error that’s going to come into play.”
He said the district carefully investigates after crashes and will “levy consequences that we believe are appropriate to the situation.”
After crash, driver not disciplined
Ritchey, the driver in the case of Matheson’s son, had been written up six times over her time with the district.
Paperwork in her file provided by the district to 9NEWS showed she was disciplined for speeding, for picking up a student who wasn’t at a bus stop and failing to use her emergency lights, for getting into a confrontation with parents in a loading zone outside a school, for stopping at a McDonald’s with a student on her bus, for failing to perform a pre-trip safety check and for allowing a student to crawl up the steps of her bus rather than boarding him in his wheelchair.
She was not disciplined for the crash, but district spokesman Joe Ferdani said she was subject to additional training and monitoring.
Matheson said the lack of discipline surprised her.
“There should be something,” she said. “I mean, we never heard from the district about this at all – and not even really an apology, not that I’m asking for an apology, but how can there not be anything? No paper? There should have been something done.”
Hinson said that Ritchey has been with the district more than 20 years and that her file shows that administrators don’t shy away from disciplining employees.
“This driver has any number of periods of time in employment – two years, three years – with no policy violations or infractions and consistently does a good job,” he said.
Although bus drivers can lose their licenses in certain circumstances – too many tickets in a short period of time, for instance – discipline for any particular crash is left up to each district.
“Normally, we don’t get involved in personnel matters with transportation operations,” said the Department of Education’s Okes.
So, how many crashes are too many?
“I think our goal needs to be no accidents,” Okes said. “Obviously, that is everybody’s ideal goal, that there would be no accidents. And we continue to evaluate our procedures and our policies and our rules and our regulations to make sure they are the most safe – they provide the safest transportation.”
Kevin Vaughan is an investigative reporter with 9Wants to Know. Contact him with tips about this or any story: kevin.vaughan@9news.com or (303) 871-1862. Rocky Mountain PBS News reporter Burt Hubbard contributed to this story.
The Durango Herald brings you this report in partnership with Rocky Mountain PBS News. Learn more at rmpbs.org/news.
