Side View Mirrors

ABIDJAN (Reuters) – From his lagoon-side allotment in Ivory Coast’s economic capital Abidjan, Moussa Yanda has a ringside seat to watch the foundations of a $290-million toll bridge slowly rise up from the shore.

“I love watching it,” enthused the softly-spoken 45-year-old as he packed up his garden tools for the day. “When things are developing, we realize we’re going to make it through this.”

Little over a year ago such optimism was scarce. Mortar bombs were pouring down around Yanda’s city garden as the West African country slipped into a civil war that claimed over 3,000 lives and forced thousands more to flee their homes.

Now, helped by billions of dollars of donor cash, President Alassane Ouattara wants to shore up the peace with a dash for economic growth like the “Ivorian miracle” which turned the country into a regional powerhouse after independence in the 1960s.

Internationally recognized as winner of a presidential election in December 2010, Ouattara had to wait over four months to enter office as incumbent Laurent Gbagbo refused to step down, pushing the country towards self-destruction.

Old ethnic wounds were opened in the violence that brought the economy of the world’s top cocoa-grower to a halt. Ouattara spent much of the conflict in an Abidjan hotel besieged by pro-Gbagbo forces before his northern allies, backed by French troops, ejected Gbagbo from his palace.

Ouattara, a 70-year-old former top International Monetary Fund official, appears determined to make up for lost time. Each day a new strip of pot-holed road is patched up and the mirror-windowed skyscrapers of Abidjan’s Plateau financial district now show few signs of the battles waged there.

The toll bridge across the lagoon, long a symbol of Ivory Coast’s arrested development in the decade of political crisis that preceded the conflict, is now being built – 15 years after the contract with France’s Bouygues was penned.

As early as his inauguration speech made a year ago on Monday, Ouattara had signalled his goal of emulating Ivory Coast’s three-decade rise that ushered in a golden age of prosperity and stability unrivalled before or since in West Africa.

“It became clear to President Felix Houphouet-Boigny very early on that peace is not an accident, but an actual development strategy,” Ouattara said then of the country’s independence president, still widely revered by Ivorians.

THE ROAD TO A RENAISSANCE

For Houphouet-Boigny, the recipe for peace was simple: heavy economic investment and close ties with international partners. Ivory Coast’s rich agricultural sector became a magnet for migrant labor from around West Africa and expatriate workers from Europe and Lebanon flocked to take a share of the riches.

But the golden era failed to survive much beyond Houphouet-Boigny’s death in 1993. Would-be heirs played the dangerous game of ethnic politics that led to a 1999 coup, a northern rebellion splitting the country in two, and a slow-burn political crisis that exploded after the December 2010 polls.

Undeterred, Ouattara is treading in Houphouet-Boigny’s steps anew with a first year in office spent blazing through projects which could be lifted straight from a donor wish-list.

A reform of the cocoa sector – while yet to fully convince the food multinationals involved – aims to boost farmers’ incomes and reverse a trend that saw the rural poverty rate jump from 15 to 62 percent between 1985-2008 despite a doubling of production during the same period.

The Ministry of Mines and Energy has promised to invest $500 million by 2015 to boost power output and meet rising domestic and regional demands for electricity. Planned reviews of the mining and petroleum codes seek to unlock the potential in these long neglected but potentially lucrative sectors.

Infrastructure left to decay for more than a decade is also being revamped with an emphasis on large public works projects.

“He’s ticking all the right boxes,” said Andris Piebalgs, European Union Development Commissioner, one of the many donors who last year gave Ouattara a vote of confidence with aid worth five percent of Gross Domestic Product.

An IMF-backed deal on debt relief, in the works for years but never finalized as Gbagbo dragged his heels on reforms, is expected in June. This could bring foreign debt down from around 50 percent of GDP to a more manageable 40 percent.

It is hard to argue with the results. The IMF sees growth of around eight percent this year, easily wiping out last year’s contraction of 4.7 percent. Analysts expect the rate to steady to a still healthy six percent next year and pursue that trend for the foreseeable future.

“Everyone in the business community is optimistic,” said Standard Bank Sub-Saharan Africa analyst and longtime Ivory Coast-watcher Samir Gadio.

“The biggest thing being achieved by improving governance is that it is creating a shift in domestic sentiment. So far there is not a major shift on either foreign direct investment and far less portfolio investment but people are starting to consider investing in Ivory Coast.”

NO RECONCILIATION, NO OPPOSITION

But if the country is on the road to a renaissance, the path remains littered with potential pitfalls – chief of which are the old rivalries deep within Ivorian society on which the first era of affluence foundered.

While Ouattara is in his element tinkering under the bonnet of the economy, his efforts to foster a wider reconciliation in a country of 20 million riven in two for over a decade remain constrained by former foes and supposed allies alike.

Even though Gbagbo lost to Ouattara, the U.N.-certified results showed he won nearly 46 percent of the vote – evidence of strong support for him and his Ivorian Popular Front (FPI) in the wealthier south of the country.

All agree that if Ivory Coast is to emerge as an inclusive democracy, it will need an opposition worthy of the name. But that is a role the FPI is not willing or able to play now.

Gbagbo is awaiting trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague on war crimes charges. His influential and much-feared wife Simone is under house arrest and most of the party leadership is in jail or exiled in countries such as Ghana.

Yet he argues its use of the euro-pegged West African CFA franc offers a degree of economic stability and inflation-proofing that neither Nigeria nor neighboring Ghana enjoy, while its relatively solid energy and transport infrastructure could provide the base for a viable light manufacturing sector.

The FPI boycotted legislative elections last year and those mid-ranking party officials still in the country snubbed an offer of jobs in the government – partly for fear of displeasing exiled or jailed superiors, but also partly out of distrust of Ouattara and his ruling Rally of the Republicans (RDR).

“We are the ones who suffered the worst difficulties,” FPI representative Sebastien Dano Djedje said, highlighting the party’s mood of resentment and alienation.

Their absence has left many Ivorians feeling excluded from politics. The risk of further marginalization is all the greater with legislation on the nationality and land ownership issues at the root of Ivory Coast’s problems now set to be decided by a parliament packed with Ouattara allies.

NO JUSTICE, NO PEACE

While some FPI conditions for re-entering politics – such as a demand that Gbagbo be freed – are unrealistic, their charge that post-war justice has been partial is seen by many as valid.

Nowhere is that truer than in Duekoue, a mainly pro-Gbagbo town in the cocoa-producing west where around 800 civilians were killed as pro-Ouattara northern rebel soldiers swept south in late March 2011 on their way to a final assault on Abidjan.

During a visit to the town last month, Ouattara repeated his promises that all crimes would be punished. But there still has not been a single arrest of a pro-Ouattara soldier.

“As of now, the promises of impartial justice have been pretty hollow, with almost no action to support the rhetoric,” said Matt Wells, who investigated the Duekoue massacres for New York-based Human Rights Watch.

While the violence of pro-Gbagbo fighters may overall have exceeded that committed by pro-Ouattara forces, critics argue the lack of full justice suggests Ouattara is beholden to the fellow northerners whose armed support he needed to win power.

“We want a light to be shone on what happened here and for justice to be done. That will make forgiveness easier,” said community leader Constant Bohe, standing beside a mass grave now covered in tall grass in Duekoue’s Carrefour neighbourhood.

TWO ARMIES

U.N. investigators believe much of the killing in the west was the settling of old land feuds between the area’s original inhabitants and migrants, from the north as well as neighboring countries, who possess most of the region’s cocoa plantations.

While security in most of the country has vastly improved, the west is still plagued by violence and awash with arms. Yet the army and police force, far from acting as guarantors of stability, constitute a serious danger in their own right.

Deep distrust exists between rank-and-file police agents, many of whom fought for Gbagbo, and their new, often northern, bosses. Security commanders are often loath to issue arms to their subordinates, creating a crippling dysfunction.

A similar split afflicts the military. The northern rebellion was spawned from a failed army mutiny in 2002. The return of ex-rebels, many with big promotions, is viewed dimly by those army officers who, regardless of their view of Gbagbo, chose not to desert during the war. The two sides rarely mix.

“If you look at the history of this country since 1999, all the problems have come from within the army … It’s very dangerous to have these different streams in the army,” said Rinaldo Depagne of the International Crisis Group think-tank.

Ouattara must also somehow succeed in breaking up rebel fiefdoms that allowed some northern commanders to get rich through the control of diamond mines, regional goods smuggling routes and illegal taxation rackets.

It will be a delicate task, not least because many former rebels feel a sense of entitlement having risked their lives backing the president. Ouattara himself has taken the defense portfolio – a clue that he will personally oversee reform of the army – but so far, little progress has been made.

“He’s acting very cautiously and taking his time. It’s very difficult for him to do it quickly and in one shot. The goal is not another war. It can appear to some observers as weakness, but I don’t think that it is,” Depagne said.

BUYING TIME

There are reasons for optimism. Regional neighbors such as Liberia and Sierra Leone have in the past two decades suffered more devastating conflicts and – so far – held the peace and made economic progress. Post-genocide Rwanda has also achieved a degree of stability through development.

While reconciliation and justice remain fundamental issues, Ouattara can bank on support from about 60 percent of voters as long as his coalition holds with the PDCI party once led by Houphouet-Boigny.

Assuming it finally wins IMF-backed debt relief, the next leap forward for Ivory Coast’s finances will be a return to international markets burned by the default on its $2.3-billion bond during last year’s conflict.

Finance Minister Charles Koffi Diby says Ivory Coast will resume interest payments this year but investors are still waiting for word on the arrears and the country will have to get a new credit rating – which could take at least two years.

Standard’s Gadio predicts that even a booming Ivory Coast will struggle to set investors’ pulses racing as Nigeria, the giant further along the West African coast, does with its oil industry and population of 160 million.

Yet he argues its use of the euro-pegged West African CFA franc offers a degree of economic stability and inflation-proofing that neither Nigeria nor neighboring Ghana enjoy, while its relatively solid energy and transport infrastructure could provide the base for a viable light manufacturing sector.

“As a country you have to decide what is your comparative advantage and exploit it,” he said, arguing that it was not too far-fetched to suggest Ivory Coast could emulate the export-led growth achieved in the past by countries such as Morocco and Tunisia.

How long it will take before Ivory Coast can start to realize such potential is unknown. By laying the foundations for a stronger economy, Ouattara is buying himself time for the longer-term task of healing the wounds of the past and knitting Ivorian society back into a peaceful whole.

“He’s heading in the right direction. He’s done many of the right things,” said one Western diplomat. “But even now it is becoming quite clear how far there still is to go on this road.” ($1 = 0.7860 euros)

(Additional reporting by Mark John in Dakar; Editing by Mark John and David Stamp)

Article source: http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/BRE84J03J/US-IVORYCOAST-MIRACLE/

India’s Sailesh Bolisetti and team-mate Phil Glew clinched victory in the second race of the British GT championship on Saturday after having finished a disappointing fifth in the first race.

The weekend had started on a positive note for the Vizag pilot with his Lotus Sport UK team finishing third and first in the two official practice sessions, but technical gremlins prevented the duo from exploiting the performance of their Lotus Evora GT4 during the qualifying sessions

The first race turned out to be a disaster of a different kind when a sudden drizzle left the track damp leading to Bolisetti spinning out on the warm-up lap while the car was on full slick tyres.

The brush with the barriers left the Evora slightly bruised, but the team was able to stitch it up in time for race start.

A slow puncture and a broken side view mirror further added to his woes and impeded progress during the race. Glew then took over after the mandatory pit stop and tyre change, but could manage to do no better than fifth.

“After showing promising pace in qualifying, it was disheartening to endure all the bad luck we did. We definitely deserved better. The pace was there all along and we fancied ourselves to challenge for the podium, but it was ultimately not to be,” said Bolisetti.

Things didn’t look brighter for race two as it was cloudy in the morning. Glew was behind the wheel for the opening stint this time and he proceeded to battle all the way through with the front-running Ginetta for the lead, just managing to keep them behind.

Glew pitted from the lead for the mandatory pit stop just past the 30-minute mark, giving Bolisetti the important task of keeping the victory challenge alive

“When Phil handed me the car from lead, the first thought in my mind was to preserve it and try to keep the opposition behind and the car out of the barriers

“The margin was slim, but we managed to turn the car around in pits quicker than our competitors so I had a little more breathing space,” said Bolisetti.

Soon after, one of the Ginetta’s retired from the race dueto a mechanical issue giving Bolisetti further leeway to hold on to the lead. From then on, it was just a matter of maintaining the cushion and driving to the car’s limits.

Finally, Bolisetti crossed the finish line 27 seconds in the lead from the second-placed Ginetta, clinching his maiden victory in the series.

“The team really deserved this given the tough weekend we had. They were extremely patient and perseverant throughout.

“To win at a track which we’ve never driven or tested is the cherry on the cake, and it isn’t just any other circuit, but a place like Nurburgring which is steeped in motor racing history,” quipped an emotional Bolisetti.

The championship returns to Britain where the third round will be held at Rockingham on June 9.

Article source: http://www.dnaindia.com/sport/report_motorsports-maiden-win-for-sailesh-bolisetti_1691314

LEGGETT ? You’ve got to be exceedingly lactose tolerant to do this job, but even I was starting to feel a little nauseated by the cheesiness of pulling off Highway 101 merely to drive my car through a redwood tree.

But, I figured, what’s another 10 minutes tacked onto a long road trip? Why not view this with the acute eye of a cultural anthropologist, observing the odd rituals of some curious tribe ? tourists?

Besides, maybe some yahoo would get his car stuck in the tree. Might be good for a few laughs at the expense of the poor sap. Gratuitous mockery, by the way, is another hazard of this job.

OK, so there are three roadside drive-thru (note the bastardized spelling) tree locations to hurtle your automobile through: The Shrine Drive-Thru Tree in Myers Flat; the Klamath Tour Thru Tree; and the Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree in Leggett.

I chose the Chandelier because ? well, it was the closest, right there where 101 and Highway 1 meet. Plus, I’d heard it was a gorgeous tree (well, as gorgeous as a redwood can be with a gaping wound carved through of its trunk) featuring branches 100 feet up that cascade down on each side like chandeliers.

When I pulled up to the ticket booth to plunk down my $5 entrance fee, I saw a motorcyclist in front of me and a blue minivan pulling up behind.

Scoping things out, it seemed my best chance of witnessing a tree-stuck vehicle on this lazy Sunday afternoon would be the bloated minivan. I silently congratulated myself for picking my company’s hybrid Honda sedan instead of the Hyundai SUV for this trip.

At the booth, ticket taker Lori Wellborn carried that blank expression of sheer, utter boredom you often see on the faces of CalTrans toll takers. But she was pleasant when I start chatting her up. Her spiel seemed recited by rote.

“The property’s been in the Underwood family since 1922,” she said. “They carved the tree in the ’30s. The current owner is John Stevenson, a nephew of the Underwoods. There’s one remaining Underwood living on the park land.

“It gets pretty busy ? about 300 cars a day ? from when school gets out to when school starts again, sometimes into mid-October. The rest of the year, like now, is pretty quiet.”

Great. Fine. Fascinating, even. But what I really wanted to know about was the fools who get their cars stuck in the tree.

“It happens occasionally,” she said, and we shared a knowing chuckle. “It’s rare for a car to get stuck so bad they can’t get out. Usually, it’s just a scratch. You have to really work hard to get stuck.

“Most of the time, the big SUVs figure it out the hard way. Or we’ll have to tell them they aren’t allowed to go through. But we can’t stop people. We don’t have monitors. The gift shop, but that’s set back from the tree. But we can watch, and we laugh. It’s entertaining.”

I pressed for details. I held up the blue minivan behind me, but journalistic thoroughness could not be rushed.

“A summer ago,” Wellborn continued, “we had a guy carrying one of those bulbous trailers, the short ones, you know. He got the car through, fine, but he kind of wedged the trailer in. They unlatched the (trailer). Oh my God, it was a really busy day, too. So they rounded up four guys just to go in and shove the thing out. It was amusing.”

Ha-ha, yes. I thanked her and jocularly said, “Well, I gotta drive through a tree now.”

She nodded and waved the blue minivan forward.

I wended my way down the dirt road to the tree. When it appeared, it was as towering and massive as it looked on the website, maybe more so. The motorcyclist had long since passed through and I saw his machine parked next to the gift shop. I had a clear path and kept it steady 5 mph (the speed limit).

Approaching the tree, I leaned left and looked above the side mirror. Plenty of room, and I again smugly congratulated myself on driving a compact car. I straightened up, took my foot off the gas, and nosed the hood into the meat of the trunk.

That’s when I heard it ? rrrrrppptttt. A hideous screech, like a cat being run through the dryer (not that I’d personally done that, but, you know ?). I slammed on the brakes. My right side mirror was wedged into the inside of the varnished bark.

D’oh!

I sat, paralyzed, for maybe 10 seconds, assessing the situation. Rivulets of sweat trickled down my ribcage. I gingerly put the car into reverse and inched backward. Bad idea. The collapsible side mirror ground deeper into the tree, and I slammed it into park. All right, I decided, I needed to move forward and turn the wheels left for the mirror to collapse to the inside and not snap off.

Looking in the rear-view mirror, I saw the driver of the blue minivan, who later identified himself as Emadul Huq, of American Canyon, laughing a toothy laugh. I backed up and the mirror swiveled in on itself, and I was clear to complete a totally humiliating 10-foot drive.

Parking next to the gift shop, I assessed the damage. Two hairline cracks on the black plastic of the mirror, which was a tad bent, too, but no damage to the mirror itself. When I looked up, the motorcyclist was smirking at me. He took a bite out of his candy bar and kick-started his engine.

Oh, the shame. Oh, the embarrassment.

I had become the yahoo I had come here to mock.

Can’t say I didn’t deserve it.

Chandelier Drive-Thru Tree

67402 Drive Thru Tree Road, Leggett

(707) 925-6464

www.drivethrutree.com.

Hours: September through May: 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m.; June through August: 8:30 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Cost: $5

Directions from Sacramento: Take Interstate 5 north to Williams. Go west on Highway 20 toward Clear Lake. At Willits, go north on Highway 101 to the junction with Highway 1. Turn left at the sign for Drive Thru Tree Road.

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

The Bee’s Sam McManis takes “Discoveries” requests. Call him at (916) 321-1145. Twitter: @SamMcManis.

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Article source: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/05/20/4498319/discoveries-how-to-get-car-stuck.html

School-bus driver Angie Baca encountered a teacher recently at a public function. The teacher told Baca she would never take on her job: “I have 28 kids in front of me, but you have 72 kids behind you.”

Baca chuckles as she retells the tale. It is a warm May morning, and Baca is in the district’s transportation yard on Yucca Street, running through a list, checking tires, motor fluids and lights. It’s not a bad chore in the spring, but in the winter, “It’s like walking into a freezer.”

Baca started out 13 years ago earning about $9 an hour. She now makes $16.45 — a raise of a little over 50 cents a year over that period, though she (and other district personnel) have not received a raise in more than four years.

Another 50 cents per hour won’t change her financial standing much, she acknowledged. “But it would prove that we are worth it,” she said. “This is one of the biggest responsibilities in life, making sure the kids get to and from school safely.”

She’s one of several drivers who have been appearing at school board meetings lately, urging the board to give bus drivers a raise. Board President Frank Montaño, as well as the other four members, have publicly praised the drivers’ work. That’s not enough for Baca.

“Compliments are helpful, but compliments don’t pay the bills. I get upset by [the board's] lack of response. It makes us feel we are worthless.”

She likes her children, greets them one by one as they get on the bus. She has caught a couple of high schoolers with marijuana; she moves one middle-school student to a seat close to her because he “likes to get into messes, but he’s a good kid.”

The day before, she went to see one of her kids acting in Pandemonium Productions’ version of Aladdin. She and some of the kids on the bus engage in a mostly positive communal critique of the show this morning.

“The best thing about this job is working with the kids,” she said. “They tell us not to hug ‘em, but sometimes they come up and hug me. What am I supposed to do?”

Driving is easy

Randy Mondragon has been driving a school bus for the district for 10 years. He started at $10.50 per hour and currently earns just under $16. These days, the beginning salary for school bus drivers is $14 an hour. Once they have completed one year’s work, they are entitled to a raise — one cent per hour. Even if a driver stays with the district for 30 years, he or she will not top the highest possibly salary of about $21.50 per hour.

Mondragon, the driver representative for the district’s NEA-Santa Fe branch, is checking over his bus around 2 p.m. before an afternoon ride that will take just over four hours and lead him from the transportation yard to Turquoise Trail Charter School, the Academy for Technology and the Classics, and eventually to the little village of Chupadero, north of Santa Fe, where he will drop off three students.

He opens the fuse box under the stop sign on the driver’s side of the 40-foot bus. “If someone is going to plant a bomb, they’re gonna do it in here,” he said, pointing inside the box.

He, like the other 70 drivers in the district, has to perform such checks twice a day — the first time around 5:45 in the morning, and then again around 2 p.m.

“Driving is easy,” he said as he took the driver’s seat. “Everything else is not.”

He keeps a watchful eye on the kids in his large rear-view mirror while always checking the bus’ two side mirrors so he can see the traffic around him. On the Turquoise Trail portion of his run, he has to contend with a hot-shot speeder who pulls out in front of the bus and a big snake crossing the road. (He brakes for it, as Baca did on another day when a stray dog crossed her path.)

He displays a thick pile of reports of misbehavior by his passengers. “A lot of them — if you can just get them to stay seated, you’ve won the battle,” he said.

Last year a couple of middle-school kids got into a fight on his bus. “We are told, ‘If the kids get in a fight, don’t touch them,’ ” Mondragon said. “What are we supposed to do — just let ‘em knock it out?”

What he does is pull the bus over to the side of the road and call in the incident on his bus radio. His bus, like the others, sports three video cameras to keep an eye on the action.

The video cameras, which were installed at the beginning of this school year, help everyone involved, he and Baca said. They can record what the kids are doing — sleeping, studying, fighting, smoking — and they also can aid in videotaping improper conduct on the part of the bus driver. (Last year police arrested school bus driver Martin Gonzales on charges that he fondled some of the young girls on his bus route.)

Like Baca, Mondragon’s complaints and concerns don’t hide the fact that he likes his job and his passengers. “If you enjoy kids and have a nurturing sense, this is a really good job,” he said.

He said he has invited the board members, as well as Public Education Secretary-designate Hanna Skandera, to take a ride on his bus one day. Not one of them has accepted the offer, he said.

“When I meet Susana [Martinez], I’m going to invite her, too,” he said.

He likes his kids — most of them — and they like him, asking him questions, thanking him for the ride and basically behaving well on this particular day.

Still, he orders two elementary school kids to sit in the seat directly behind his — “where I can keep an eye on them,” he said.

Are they bad boys? One of them doesn’t respond; the other shakes his head no. But you can see by the look in their eyes that mischief is their main concern.

He’s committed to his charges, right to the end: “I like to show up on graduation day to see them. I helped them get there.”

The district is down 10 drivers, he said. Recruitment is a challenge because of the pay and the investment in time and money that applicants must commit for the job. Applicants, who must be 21, must pay for a federal background check, fingerprinting, a drug test and for training for a commercial-driver’s license. All told, this can equal about $250 — “a hardship for some,” Mondragon said. They receive $7.50 per hour for that training, but they have to complete a 90-day probationary period before they get reimbursed.

Recruiting challenges

Baca, Mondragon and several other drivers all said they like their new boss, Director of Transportation Ted Newton. The Charlotte, N.C., native, who began working for the district last autumn, has worked in the transportation field for some 30 years.

The department’s budget is about $3.3 million, Newton said. It has about 100 employees, 75 buses (with an expected lifespan of 20 years), and 62 routes to cover. As of mid-May this year, drivers have logged in 1,041,207 miles.

Roughly 50 people have applied for a bus-driver job since Newton came on last October. He has hired three of them. The rest failed something somewhere along the line.

The low salary is a factor in recruitment, he said, but $14 an hour is a little higher than salaries he’s encountered in other parts of the country. (The average bus-driver salary in the country, based on various reports, is somewhere in the $15-an-hour range. City of Santa Fe bus drivers start out at about $13 and may work their way up to about $28 per hour.)

Being down 10 drivers means that the department’s mechanics or administration personnel (all of whom have commercial driver’s licenses) must fill in on some routes. Newton intends to build a relationship with the New Mexico Department of Workforce Solutions to recruit drivers. He also wants to start evaluating drivers (it’s been several years since the district has done so), although he’s not sure that employee evaluations should be tied to a pay raise. But he would like to see drivers get a pay raise after they fulfill a probationary period of 90 days. In addition, he wants to add extra security measures to the transportation yard.

If drivers report misbehaving children, Newton will jump in his car and follow the bus from behind. He’ll talk directly to repeat student offenders, reading them the riot act, he said. But parents who are concerned about bullying on the buses should understand that, “The bus driver can only react after the fact. He can’t prevent something happening on the bus while he is driving.” But drivers can push a red button near their wheel that will immediately pinpoint where on the videotape a problematic incident begins.

School board member Linda Trujillo — whose sister drives a school bus in Washington state for about $16 per hour — isn’t sure if the low pay is the only barrier to hiring new drivers. The challenge for recruitment is in relation to the training, she said.

“They are paying for their own training. We don’t have a program set up where if we help them for the training, they [in turn] stay with us for at least a year,” she said. “I believe that’s the bigger issue for recruitment. The pay is a challenge for retainment. Bus drivers are a key piece to the district. They have a bus load full of kids most of the time; they put up with a lot of safety and behavioral issues. I remember driving just five of my own kids — and it wasn’t always a pleasant experience.”

Contact Robert Nott at 986-3021 or rnott@sfnewmexican.com.