Arizona school buses failed almost 30 percent of safety inspections in 2015

• Roosevelt Elementary School District has the highest bus inspection failure rate in Maricopa County.
• Buses with multiple inspection failures over three years made up almost 40 percent of the state’s total failures
• Gov. Doug Ducey instructs Department of Public Safety to 'take a very thorough look at our current practices'

Every day hundreds of thousands of Arizona children ride yellow school buses to and from school or on field trips.

For some students, the trip is just a mile or two. For others, the ride is much longer. Some students in rural areas endure bone-jarring rides on rutted roads that can last more than two hours, each way.

Parents and students assume the school buses are safe, regardless of where they live or how long the ride.

But an investigation by The Arizona Republic found that almost three out of 10 school bus safety inspections conducted by the state last year resulted in a failure because of a "major defect."

The investigation found Arizona's safety inspection failure rate nearly doubled from 2013 to 2015, from 15.4 to about 29 percent.

That rate ranks as one of the highest in the nation. By comparison, the failure rate is 2.7 percent in California; 12 percent in Utah; and 15 percent in New Mexico.

The Arizona school buses failed for having cracked and rotted tires and emergency exits and alarms that don't function like they should.

They failed for having seats that either weren't completely secured to the floor or had their steel frames exposed.

They failed for defective emergency brakes that don't work properly.

When told of the high number of bus safety inspection failures, one parent said she was "shocked."

"I automatically assumed ... buses are safe. You trust them with your kids," said Desiree Welzel, whose two children ride the bus in the Roosevelt Elementary School District in south Phoenix.

Roosevelt has the highest bus inspection failure rate in Maricopa County.

Findings in school bus inspections from 2013-15

The Republic obtained every failed school bus inspection report from 2013-15 through the Arizona Public Records Law. The newspaper created a searchable database from those documents.

The database allows parents to search failure rates for all school districts, charter schools, and private schools in the state as well as the reasons individual buses failed. The Republic is publishing that database online at azcentral.com.

The Republic's main findings include:

• In 2013, 1,194 school bus inspections out of 7,734 resulted in one or more major defect violations — about 15.4 percent
• Last year, schools failed 2,086 out of 7,219 bus safety inspections — about 28.9 percent.
• Buses with multiple inspection failures in this three-year span made up almost 40 percent of the state’s total failed inspections.
• This year, at least 92 districts, charters and private schools failed 25 percent or more of their inspections that were completed by late June. 
• School districts rarely disclose the annual results of school bus safety inspection reports to the public. 
• DPS does not tell school administrators how their buses performed. The department works with schools' transportation departments. Whether inspection results are communicated to school superintendents is left at the schools' discretion.

When informed of The Republic's findings, Gov. Doug Ducey instructed the Department of Public Safety to "take a very thorough look at our current practices" to see what needs improvement, said Daniel Scarpinato, the governor's spokesman.

"It certainly looks like this is an area where there needs to be additional attention and study into how we can be providing greater safety to children in our schools," Scarpinato said.

"Everyone has a responsibility — the state, school systems and policy makers — in making sure that when a student steps onto a school bus in the morning and leaves his or her parents, they are safe," he said.

Expert: High failure rates are alarming

School officials offered a range of explanations for the rising number of school buses failing inspections.

Officials in districts with some of the highest failure rates point to nearly a decade of diminished state funding that has made it harder for school districts to buy new buses to replace old ones.

Schools across the state are grappling with driver shortages. The shortages affect school bus maintenance programs because mechanics are sometimes called upon to fill in on bus routes.

Many schools say they are forced to ask  taxpayers to approve bonds and capital overrides to pay for new buses.

The other option, which many schools say they already do: running buses past their recommended lifespan to where they're more likely to fall into disrepair.

It is unclear how long school buses run routes before the state's annual inspections catches them with violations that render them out of service until the defects can be fixed.

DPS officials say the bus inspections they do are rigorous. Failed buses have to clear a follow-up inspection before they're allowed to transport students.

Many school officials said they don't run buses that fail safety inspections and are vigilant about finding any deficiencies through their preventative maintenance programs. The buses are certified to go back on the road within a day, they said.

Robert Berkstresser, a Southern California-based school bus consultant, called that "backward thinking." Berkstresser reviewed The Republic's data on some of the schools with the highest fail rates.

He said high failure rates were alarming because they indicate many students in Arizona are transported on school buses with major defects that aren't caught until they are inspected by the state.

“When the Department of Public Safety comes in and finds that five buses had brakes that were out of adjustment, well, that didn’t happen two hours before those folks came in to do the inspections," Berkstresser said.

"So you can’t tell me that the buses were out there on the road being operated in a safe condition."

'I don’t think it’s acceptable to have 93 failed inspections’

On an afternoon in late August, a yellow school bus stopped at a corner of 15th Avenue in south Phoenix north of John R. Davis Elementary School.

Welzel, the parent, was waiting near the curb as her second-grade son, Austin, stepped off the bus.

"Wow ... Wow," Welzel said as she leafed through bus inspection reports provided by Republic reporters.

The Republic found the Roosevelt Elementary School District had the highest failure rate — 73 percent — of any district in Maricopa County during the 2013- 2015 period.

Welzel, who also has a kindergarten daughter who rides the bus to Davis, said she would have preferred to find out about the inspections from the school rather than the newspaper.

"I'm mad," Welzel said. "I'm really upset with the school district because I think it's something that they should've put out there."

The Republic found that the bus that dropped off Austin had failed three separate inspections.

In 2013 and 2015, the bus failed separate inspections because it had unsecured items on board. In 2014, the bus failed for multiple reasons, including defective axle positioning parts, a broken leaf spring in its suspension and for having a tire-tread depth less than a sixteenth of an inch on the left rear inside tire.

The district’s buses have failed for a variety of reasons — from faulty brakes to having loose items inside the bus, such as brooms.

FAILED SCHOOL BUS INSPECTIONS: Part 1: How safe are your children? | Part 2: 'Buses weren't made to run on these roads' | Part 3: How Arizona's regulations compare | The tale of one failing bus | Tell us your story | Search for your child's bus | See our complete coverage | How the investigation unfolded

“Replace seat foams throughout bus, no padding on top, can feel steel frame … EXCESSIVE oil leak from power steering onto right side of engine and exhaust pipe,” reads the inspection report of one Roosevelt school bus that was forced out of service in 2013.

That same bus failed another inspection in 2014 for an inoperable brake tail light and front brakes that were out of adjustment.

Jeane Koba, superintendent of the Roosevelt school district, said the school district takes school bus safety seriously.

But she couldn't explain why the district hasn't disclosed bus inspection failures in the past. She said she was unaware of the district's bus inspection performance until after she became superintendent in 2015.

The district, Koba said, does not “knowingly or purposefully send out a bus that we don’t feel is safe. … Buses that are unsafe need to be out.”

Koba said the main reason the district has such a high failure rate is that about 60 percent of its buses were purchased more than 12 years ago. About 20 buses date back to the mid- to late 1990s.

Since 2013, however, the district has purchased with bonds three new buses a year to replace the oldest and most problematic buses in its 42-bus fleet, she said.

But it will be almost impossible for Roosevelt to buy more new buses in the near-term.

The district has overspent its budget by $4.4 million since 2013 and is in the process of repaying the money to the state.

So the district will have to find other ways to keep the buses it already owns safely on the road, Koba said.

"No, I don’t think it’s acceptable to have 93 failed inspections, and we have to fix that," Koba said.

"... But when you have a school bus, you can keep repairing it and making it safe, you’re going to do that because you need a teacher and a child in the classroom with the materials to learn."

Bus failures are rarely disclosed publicly

School district officials are not required by the state to inform their governing boards how many of their schools fail the state's annual safety inspections.

Board members, like the rest of the public, can request the information from schools.

Many districts, it appears, don't disclose school bus failure rates publicly.

A Republic review of school agendas and minutes from 30 school districts for the 2015-16 school year found some districts referenced the difficulties of maintaining aging bus fleets.

But none mentioned school bus inspections.

One school district, the Maricopa Unified School District, presented the results of 2015 school bus safety inspections at its Aug. 24 meeting, following questions from The Republic on whether that information is disclosed to the public.

The Nadaburg Unified School District in Wittmann told The Republic that bus safety inspections are presented to their governing board every year.

However, The Republic found no references to bus safety inspections in the minutes and agendas for that district's board meetings for the past three years.

DPS officials said they plans to develop a protocol to notify school administrators of their bus inspection performances.

‘We are talking health and safety of students’

The Wickenburg Unified School District failed 58 percent of its school bus inspections from 2013-15, far above the 21 percent failure rate statewide during that period.

Howard Carlson, Wickenburg's superintendent, said maintaining the district's fleet of 21 school buses has been one of the district's many competing priorities this year.

The rural district in northwest Maricopa County wants to provide more-competitive teacher salaries. More than half of the district’s teachers have left the past three years.

It had to repair the leaky roof of its 17-year-old high school gym.

And, more of a need than a want, Carlson said: new buses.

The average age of the district’s bus fleet is 17.4 years.

Wickenburg runs every one of its 21 buses on daily routes.

FAILED: Arizona school bus safety

The district ran a school bus during the 2015-16 school year that had a leaking head gasket, according to the Wickenburg Sun. As a result, the district ran the bus on a short route, and needed a half gallon of coolant a day to keep from overheating, the newspaper reported.

That specific bus failed every one of its annual safety inspections from 2013-15, The Republic's investigation found. The bus' failures included an air leak in its rear service brakes, an improperly installed battery and worn steering components.

When DPS inspectors find major defects on a bus, the repairs usually are made on the spot or within a day, Carlson said.

But last year, when the district failed 15 inspections in four days, there weren’t enough school buses to take every student home.

Buses had to be loaned by neighboring school districts. When a Wickenburg bus breaks down or has to be taken off the road because of a failed inspection, other schools chip in.

“We would never run a bus that we feel is unsafe," Carlson said.

But, he added, “because they’re getting older, even with regular maintenance they’re going into disrepair.”

Steve Sorenson, a Wickenburg dad of five, said the failed inspections don't "shake my confidence very much" in the district's ability to maintain its buses.

However, he said the age of Wickenburg's fleet is concerning.

"Just in the last few years, our kids have been left on the side of highways waiting for a bus sometimes late into the night or early into the next morning," Sorenson said. "Sometimes (they're) stuck in parking lots and other places because a bus breaks down."

Options appear limited. A new bus would cost the district roughly $130,000. That's more than the $118,000 Wickenburg received this year from the state in capital funding known as District Additional Assistance.

Using state money to address every capital need is “impossible,” Carlson said.

The district last passed a bond in 2002, and has not asked for a bond in recent years.

This November, voters will decide whether to approve a $10 million bond that would help replace almost every school bus in Wickenburg's fleet.

The district would keep the "best four buses" as spares," Carslon said. Most districts try to cycle out school buses so that the cost is spread out.

Carlson said the move is necessary.

"It's no longer a wish list or something that would be a benefit in general. Rather we are talking health and safety of students," he said.

The steepest cut to state funding

Financial constraints like Wickenburg’s have become more common in Arizona following the recession when the state cut the amount of money it gives to schools for capital expenses. Those funds are used for expenses such as buying new textbooks, building repairs and expansion, technology and infrastructure — and new buses.

But The Republic found that districts were no more likely to have lower inspection failures if they had passed bonds, or if they spent more on transportation.  

In 2007, before the recession hit, school districts received about $450 per student for capital expenses under the state’s per-pupil funding formula.

The formula gives schools a base amount for each student as well as weighted categories such as special education and high-school students.

Capital funding took the steepest cut in the formula when the recession hit. Today, most schools receive about $77 per student for capital expenses.

This creates dilemmas for districts like  Tucson Unified, the second-largest in Arizona, which failed 276 bus inspections between 2013 and 2015.

That is the highest number of inspections failed by any district, in part because it has one of the largest fleets. The district had a failure rate of 28 percent over that period, the highest of the state's 10 largest school districts based on enrollment.

The district reduced the number of failed bus inspections by more than half during that time, from 140 in 2013 to 64 in 2015. Over that period, the district's failure rate fell from 40 percent in 2013 to 19 percent in 2015.

Ken Bolle, bus fleet manager for Tucson Unified, said there are fewer failures because the district is “adapting” by doubling the number of times it performs maintenance on its buses.

The district has a fleet of 325 buses. Its replacement plan calls for keeping school buses in service for 15 years. That comes out to about 20 new buses a year at a cost of $2.5 million, said H.T. Sanchez, Tucson Unified's superintendent.

Tucson Unified plans to spend about $1.1 million on new buses this school year. The district is about 59 buses behind its replacement schedule, Sanchez said.

The district could shift money away from classroom spending to buy new buses. But that would likely not be popular with parents, Sanchez said.

“There’s this stigma with shifting dollars that come in from maintenance and operation over to capital,” Sanchez said.

“When you do that, you get portrayed in the public that you’re shifting money away from instruction and what districts do is they hold off on that as much as possible.”

FAILED SCHOOL BUS INSPECTIONS: Part 1: How safe are your children? | Part 2: 'Buses weren't made to run on these roads' | Part 3: How Arizona's regulations compare | The tale of one failing bus | Tell us your story | Search for your child's bus | See our complete coverage | How the investigation unfolded