NEW ORLEANS — Less than a week after a bus crash on Interstate10 injured nine students on their way to James M. Singleton charter school, city officials are talking about how to prevent this from happening again.
“We need additional partners when it comes to this,” said John Pourciau, chief of staff Mayor LaToya Cantrell. “When you are talking about the safety of your kids, 'not my job' isn't good enough.”
The Hammond Transportation bus that crashed never passed city inspection. The driver was also denied a permit for a 2016 drug conviction. And we learned Monday about 300 of the 740 school buses across the school system (that’s more than 40 percent) have still not passed inspection under the city’s safety regulations.
“This is obviously vital. This is really important that our kids get to and from school safely and we need to make sure everyone is working to make sure that happens. That’s the school board, that’s the bus companies and that’s the school themselves,” said Pourciau.
On Monday, Zachary Smith, the director of the city’s safety and permits department, said he wants to see the Orleans Parish School Board put schools that have bad buses on official notice.
“What is important to know this is that there will be an aggressive push in the next semester but something that can be done concretely is to make sure the school board gets official correspondence to these schools,” said Smith. “Letting them know (they) are now put on notice that (they) have buses that are operating with tax dollars and are putting the kids in jeopardy.”
The Orleans Parish School board did not get back to us with a comment Monday but last week Superintendent Dr. Henderson Lewis admitted more needs to be done when it comes to school bus safety.
“I have directed my team to explore options the district can take to increase bus safety including but not limited to allowing only the highest quality bus operators to service our city,” said Lewis. “We will implement additional policies around transportation and demand that schools and their bus providers actively work with the city to get buses inspected.”
We asked if whether an inspection would have prevented any issues that led to Wednesday’s crash on the bus carrying 15 students that hit guardrail just west of the high-rise bridge on I-10 westbound but city officials said it was still too early to tell.
Since the bus crash, the city has inspected 16 buses, four of those failed. According to our partners at The Times Picayune/New Orleans Advocate those buses failed because of broken emergency hatches, cracked windshields, windows that didn’t work and missing signage.
The city says they are working overtime, including weekends, to get buses inspected. They also say are continuing to work with the New Orleans Police Dept. to ramp up enforcement and that they are still holding safety seminars with the bus companies.
We reached out to Hammond Transportation, the company whose bus crashed, about how many of their other buses have still not been inspected. They did not get back to us for comment.
RELATED: 'We must do more': NOLA-PS Superintendent vows to do all he can to make sure buses are up to code
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