STUDENTS of Holmwood Technical High in Manchester now feel safer travelling to and from school following the roll-out of 12 contracted buses by the institution last month.

The students, some of whom the guidance counsellor said suffered from the fear of travelling, have comfortably settled into taking the buses driven by more mature, responsible drivers.

“The students feel much safer now,” Omiel Smikle, head boy at the school, told the Jamaica Observer on Thursday.

“The drivers are more mature and older and, of course, this reduces the incidence of careless driving. The other bus drivers have no respect for anybody, they have no respect for life, and the music that they play on the buses is terrible. They allow lewd music, ‘lap up’ and so on,” he said.

The school introduced the new, exclusive bus service after three serious crashes which claimed the lives of seven Holmwood students over the past two years.

In April 2011, three female students were killed on the Bryce Hill Road when a speeding minibus in which they were passengers crashed into a wall and overturned after failing to properly negotiate a corner.

In January this year, 18 students were injured in another bus crash on the Kendall main road. While on September 25, four students were killed in Chudleigh, North East Manchester as a result of what police reported to be careless driving.

Smikle said the present bus system gives students a chance to realise that life is indeed precious and they feel more comfortable travelling to and from school.

“We had this problem where students were rebelling against implementing this bus system. At first, the guidance counsellors made it known that they were going to bring in this system, but the students refused and rebelled each time. So after the first incident the students rebelled, but after the last incident that’s when they realised that rebelling leads to danger and death. That is the reason why this bus system is as it is now,” he said.

Vice-principal of the school, Edward Hector, said for the most part the majority of students are compliant with travelling on the buses provided, while punishment is handed down to those who weren’t.

“What we say is that, if we find them taking any other buses within the specified time that we did not arrange, then they would be punished,” Hector said. “If they come later than when we have done our business then they are on their own.”

Hector explained that the buses are provided through an arrangement between the owners and the school.

“They are what you could call private contractors who maybe have their buses and not doing much work on a regular basis,” he explained. “They carry the students up in the mornings and take them back down to Mandeville in the afternoons and they travel at their own pace and don’t have to race.”

Lucetta Samuels-Hall, guidance counsellor and coordinator of the school’s bus system, said there were a number of students who suffered from a fear of travelling following the September 25 crash. The new bus system has served as therapy to them and they have started feeling safer now when travelling.

“We are coping. I think the students have bounced back very well,” Samuels-Hall said confidently.

She said one of the students involved in the crash in January was one of those who suffered from the fear of travelling.

“His mother took him in the day and he was ready to go back home with his mother,” she recalled. “And I told him no, I was going to put him on the bus the evening and it would take him straight to his home and in the morning he would be picked up from home and taken to school.

“Since then, he has been coming to school every day as he got over his fear of travelling. The system works and they [drivers] look out for the students. We just feel that they are a part of the school’s community,” Samuels-Hall said.

She explained that a bus service was in place before the last crash but students and parents refused to comply.

“People have the impression that when the accidents happened two years ago that nothing was done by the school, but that’s not true,” Samuels-Hall said. “We did try to start a bus system.”

She explained that prior to the 2011 crash, there was also a crash in which one student died.

“We tried starting a bus system from then but we did not get the support of the students nor the parents,” she explained. “It was in January this year that there was another accident where the bus turned over at Kendall and we started back a bus system. A gentleman came in with a bus and we decided to work with him. But the first morning he came up he only came up with nine students. Gradually, after pushing and pushing I got them to catch onto it and we eventually had one bus running. And that was from January (2013). So it’s not that nothing was done.”

Samuels-Hall said even after calling some of the parents and encouraging them to let their children take the bus provided, the parents would report that the child said they did not want to travel on the bus.

“They wanted the fast buses, they wanted the loud music, so they did not gravitate to the coaster that we provided,” she said.

It wasn’t until the Government stepped in, she said, and when the parents saw that crashes, as a result of careless and reckless driving, were claiming the lives of their children time and again that they pushed their children to co-operate with the school’s bus system.

The crash in September, she said, “was worse than the others because in the accidents before you could identify those students on spot, but this time we could not identify these students on the spot, because three of these students were new, so we would not really have known them”.

This resulted in panic among parents as they hastened to find out whether or not their children were among the victims.

Today, she said the 12 buses, all equipped with magnetic stickers bearing the school’s name, are well supported.

“It’s challenging because now we face the problem where the students are not coming out on time. You still find quite a few of them coming to school late. But the operators that we are using, they are experienced, mature men. Some of them are connected to JUTA (Jamaica Union of Travellers Association), some with JCAL (Jamaica Co-operative Automobile and Limousine Tours Ltd), so they have that mature experience,” she explained.

Samuels-Hall said that the buses each make one trip in the mornings, after which they are parked on the school compound. Then, in the afternoons, they take the more than 600 students back to Mandeville, the route on which all the crashes occurred.

“Most of them are here throughout the day, but if they have things to do during the day they will leave, but come back for 3:30 to load the bus,” she explained.

The school’s population currently stands at 1,800.

However, plans are in place to include students travelling from other areas.

“The population is very wide because we have students travelling from as far as St Ann and Trelawny,” she said. “So we want a bus coming from Trelawny and we need a bus coming from St Ann. We have a small bus that runs from Porus (Manchester), with one coaster and one small bus that run from Junction and Alligator Pond in St Elizabeth that come straight to the school. And we have one bus that goes on the route to Royal Flat,” she explained. “So we are just trying to cover all our students. We’re trying to get everybody into the system. But it takes time.”

She said the school does not profit financially from the bus service, neither does the school pay the drivers.

The school will collect the $200 per day for each student then hand the total sum over to the drivers at the end of the week or the drivers will themselves do the collecting. “All that we benefit is that our students are being transported in what we would consider a safer manner. Discipline for the students has improved, attendance and punctuality have improved, and hopefully their academics should improve,” she said.

Samuels-Hall insisted that the school should not have been blamed for the deaths of the students because the buses involved in the crashes were neither owned nor contracted by the school.

She said that rumours of human sacrifice were also unfair and baseless, but understandable since at the time of any incident persons have emotions and are looking for answers.