Orono police are cracking down on drivers ignoring stopped school buses following recent complaints from a local parent and bus driver.
Jessica Steeves, a bus driver with Cyr Bus Line who transports nearly 80 Orono students on a daily basis, said between last September and this month, she counted 254 drivers who ran her stop sign. In early April, she asked the town to respond to the issue before an accident happens.
Orono police officers last week began tailing school buses and pulling over drivers violating the rules. They’re issuing tickets in most cases. The move is part of a 12-week effort to aggressively target the problem and educate the public so that students using the bus system are safe, Chief Dan Merrill said.
Eventually he will report back to the Town Council with traffic violation data and other findings.
Within the first week of following Steeves, whose route is the most problematic, police stopped four cars for passing her bus with flashing lights, which resulted in two warnings and two tickets, Merrill said.
He budgeted $10,000 for the effort, which he had in the department’s budget from a project that never came to fruition last summer. The funds will be used to pay overtime to officers working four-hour blocks solely dedicated to following school buses during their morning or afternoon routes.
“We’re going heavy on this,” he said. “We want to set the bar high if it’s a clear violation. It’s a class E crime to pass a stopped school bus.”
Merrill is also looking into how other towns have attempted to educate drivers violating rules related to school buses. Farmington, for example, put up signs in an area with heavy traffic, and he may use the town as a model to develop signs for Stillwater Avenue in Orono.
That area, near University Mall, is where a multi-lane stretch of road tends to confuse drivers when they see a stopped bus, he said. Main Street and Kelley Road are also problematic, and the three areas are where officers are seeing the largest number of violations, mostly from drivers failing to stop in front of buses. Drivers behind buses are less of a problem, he said, though those violations happen too.
Steeves has noticed a pattern of some drivers looking down at their cellphones, while others make eye contact and “blatantly disrespect my stop sign,” even flipping her off in a few instances, she said. She noted that Cyr Bus Line has started to send camera footage to the department to find drivers breaking the rules when an officer isn’t there.
“My whole goal is to keep my kids safe,” she said. “This is my third school year with them, and I would be devastated if something happened. I feel like we’re on the right track now.”