School bus stop sign violations putting North Georgia and Hamilton County children at risk

DALTON, Georgia (WDEF) — The arrests of two moralist who were allegedly caught in the act of illegally driving past a Whitfield County school bus that was dropping off children is just a microcosm of a much bigger problem all across the U.S.

Logan Patterson and Edith Chavarria-Hernandez are both facing charges by Whitfield County authorities for violating school bus stop signs. Unfortunate, this is no isolated situation in Whitfield County.

“It’s definitely an ongoing problem. We are only a couple of months into the school year this year and have already had numerous violations of school bus stop signs,” said Rick Holsomback who is the Director of Whitfield County School Transportation.

Georgia is one of several states equipping buses with side-mounted cameras to capture violators in the act, but in Whitfield County, school bus are not yet equipped with that technology, so drivers are writing down license plate numbers and filling out complaint forms which are handed off to law enforcement.

“And law enforcement does pursue that and try to get the attention of those violators to try to keep the children safe,” Holsomback said.

Across the state line into Tennessee, Hamilton County School transportation officials are facing the same problem.

“Here in Hamilton County we have about 200 incidents a day in which people run our stop signs on school buses,” said Ben Coulter who is the Director of Hamilton County School Transportation.

Unlike neighboring Georgia, Tennessee school officials can’t rely on cameras mounted on the side of school buses to catch a violator.

“An officer has to observe the violation themselves in order to issue a citation. So here, we can put camera’s on there but all we can do is report them to the Tennessee Highway patrol or local law enforcement. They can go have a talk with the person or something like that, but that would be the end of it,” Coulter said.

School officials in Hamilton County are trying to put enough pressure on state lawmakers to allow cameras to capture violators so it won’t come down to a bus drivers word versus the word of a violator.

CBS news recently highlighted the problem by showing actual footage from camera’s mounted on buses. The footage showed children getting of the bus then being hit by vehicles that didn’t stop.

The CBS report also highlighted the fact that last year alone, there were more than 13-million incidents involving people passing school buses. On average, eight children a year are killed by drivers who ignore school bus stop signs.