The Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune recently carried a story that made me sit up and take notice. I forwarded it to my children, who have their own children, and to all my friends who are parents of young children. The story wasn’t about toxic paint on toys or any of that other stuff that’s been in the news lately.
It was about van drivers. The subject was the lack of mandatory background checks on van drivers. Here’s an excerpt.
More than 2,000 minivans and passenger vehicles carry special education and other students in Minnesota every year, and the only requirement for their drivers is to have a valid regular driver’s license. Those drivers are not subject to the rigorous requirements set for drivers of school buses, said Capt. Ken Urquhart, pupil transportation safety director for the State Patrol. State and federal laws require school bus drivers to have annual physicals, undergo random drug and alcohol tests and criminal background and driving record.
Wow. Think about who rides in those vans. It’s kids who are in pre-schools or participating in after-school programs. It’s the developmentally-disabled and senior citizens. It’s travelers going to and from the airport.
And think about what they’re riding in. Vans have some of the nastiest crashes because they carry more passengers than a car and their higher center of gravity means they’re more likely to roll over.
Don’t wait for legislators to act on this one. Start with your own family and people you know.
If you’ve got children or aging parents who ride in transport vans, find out if the drivers are screened. If not, make a stink.
Van drivers should have their backgrounds and driving records checked as a condition of employment. They should be required to have annual physicals, just like school bus drivers. They should be subject to random testing for drugs and alcohol.
Sound unreasonable? Not if it’s your child or your parent riding in that van.
Yeah, it is scary. It isn’t the physicals though that should be done. It is the background checks that see if they have a violent history.
The bus physical is pretty much a joke. They make you squat basically and that is about it. It is essentially a waste of time.
The question is whether there have been actual, troubling incidents. If not, this might be a “slow news day” story cooked up by a reporter with column inches to fill and nothing to work with except the “what if” game.
Here’s an example of what I mean: produce in grocery stores is often displayed and sold without protective wrappers. This means that perhaps hundreds of people, many of them unsupervised, have moved, touched and otherwise handled bananas before we see them displayed in the store.
Can we really be sure that these bananas haven’t been tampered with, perhaps injected with drugs or poison? The answer, of course, is that we can’t!
But if there are no reported cases of poisoned grocery store fruit, perhaps we are “safe enough” the way things are.