REGINA -- Tina Caderma has been a school bus driver for 10 years, but she’s currently on stress leave due to what she calls unsafe situations on some school buses caused by overcrowding.
“There’s times where I’m sitting going, ‘Holy man, if all of my kids show up, I don’t know where everybody is sitting,’” Caderma said.
LP3 Transportation is contracted by the Regina Catholic School Division to provide bus transportation and operates buses that have a 71-student capacity.
The School Division says they don’t have any buses with more than 70 students.
Caderma feels that number isn’t safe and causes too many distractions for the drivers.
“As a bus driver, those are our customers and those families are important to us and so when we’re out there and we know that we have to get into our bus and drive in an imperfect situation that grates on everybody,” Caderma said.
Dave White with Legacy Group, which operates LP3 Transportation, says the company has systems in place to help their drivers deal with stress.
“We have a wellness room, our number one value is community, a lot of the other systems like the way we train our employees, the way we support them, to my knowledge, we’re the only company that has a student behavior management specialist on staff and we have a great relationship with the school board,” White said.
Caderma wants to see policy changes to make life easier on the bus drivers and safer for the students on the bus.
“I have to believe that there’s a better way and hopefully we can figure that out,” she said. “A coalition of drivers or drivers that just get together and say these are the recommendations that we would make to make our jobs better and then everybody wins.”
Caderma adds the kids on her bus are like her kids and she just wants to keep them safe.
