Reducing misbehavior on school buses

Are there ways to improve students' behavior?

Amid all the reports during the fall of 2023 about schools needing bus drivers, having to reduce the number of routes driven, and so forth, I also read a local news report about addressing bus issues. Two people vying for a position on a local school board provided the news:

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One of the first questions posed to candidates was how they’d try to fix the bus driver shortage.

[Candidate B] said drivers do not feel as though they are being listened to, and she argued that they should be given a 12-month pay period instead of nine.

[Candidate S] suggested raising pay to a living wage, and to discipline unruly students.

Leaving aside the obvious questions about these candidates’ thinking about pay (does B really propose to pay employees who work 9 or 10 months for 12 months? Does S actually know that the schools currently pay drivers something close to double the estimated local living wage?), I want to address the matter of disciplining of unruly students.

Hmm...”unruly students.” I’m not sure whether that was the candidate’s choice of words or the reporter’s phrasing. Either way, it cuts a bit against my grain. I can understand wanting to decrease the frequency, intensity, or duration (or a combination of those features) of unruly behavior, but I am reluctant to get behind disciplining students. Actions I associate with disciplining students tend toward punishment, ranging from loss of privileges (e.g., in-school suspension) to more direct infliction of aversive consequences (e.g., paddling!). I do not favor such discipline.

Please don’t misunderstand. I don’t propose that we educators put our heads into the sand, that we fail to address unruly behavior on buses. Even though students some times report more prosocial than aggressive behavior on school buses (Galliger et al., 2009), there is ample evidence that misbehavior—including sexual misconduct (Allen et al., 2008)—occurs on school buses (deLara, 2008). Furthermore, there’s little doubt that disruptive student behavior distracts drivers (e.g., Goodboy et al., 2016; Zohor & Lee, 2016).

As most readers know, I recommend addressing misbehavior by teaching appropriate behavior and creating environments that provide pleasant consequences for behaving appropriately. How, someone might ask, do you propose to do that?

There’s just the driver and the kids on the bus, and that driver’s got to drive so that the kids are safe. Drivers do not have the time, expertise, or training to implement teaching and behavior management systems. We can’t afford to have a skillful behavior manager riding each bus. Wouldn’t it be easier just to put a video camera on the bus, review the “tapes,” and give demerits to kids who are unruly? Why do something to all those kids when there are just a couple rotten apples who spoil the barrel?

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Without examining the full range of myriad problems with punishment, let me focus only on one. Punishing a behavior (note: not a child) leaves the punished individual to discover more appropriate responses. Instead, let’s teach appropriate behavior. Show learners how to behave in ways that gains or maintains access to a reinforcing environment. Help the learner practice those behaviors. Provide copious feedback during acquisition of the behaviors. And then insure that existing environments are built so that reinforcement follows the appropriate behaviors.

I am proposing that educators adopt teaching systems for improving behavior on buses. And, I have reason to argue that such systems can be designed and implemented successfully.

I’m not making this up out of whole cloth. Honest.

Recommended practices

Often discussions of student safety on school buses address important matters such as how to approach and board a bus or how to disembark and move away from a bus. Too few provide recommendations about how to behave while riding a bus. Sadly, some of the recommendations that agencies promote are pretty weak (e.g.,National Highway Traffic Safety Agency, n.d. ).

Happily, there are well-documented alternatives. Here are nnn examples.

• Chiang et al. (1978) had a bus driver adminiser a token reinforcement program to improve the behavior of a elementary student who had intellectual disabilities. The token system included points for appropriate behavior or response cost for inappropriate behavior. The driver awarded, withheld, or taken away every so often, based on distance of the drive. The authors reported that the results showed substantial decreases in disruptive behavior during the bus rides.

• Collins and Ryan (2016) examined the effects of implementing Positive Behavioral Interventions and Support procedures for seven bus drivers at a Title 1 middle school. Although administrators reported reservations about the initial implementation of the program, they found that drivers’ referrals of students for misbehavior on the buses declined when the PBIS program was initiated. Although the research methods leave some questions open, the demonstration is dramatic.

• Ritschl et al. (1972) employed a time-out procedure to observed instances of out-of-seat behavior on school buses. No, don’t jump to the conclusion that “time out” means the children were moved to a quiet, dim place; physical isolation is a misrepresentation of “time out.” Ricschl et al. simply had music playing when everyone was in her or his seat; if student got out of his or her seat, the music stopped.

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• In a pair of studies, Greene et al. (1981) employed an electronic system that monitored noise levels on a school bus and provided feedback to children about how noisy the bus was. If it was too noisy, student-selected music stopped playing over the buses speaker systems. In one of the studies, students earned tickets that they could use to enter a raffle for rewards, but in the other there was no raffle, just the music+feedback system. In both studies, the intervention resulted in lower levels of noise as well as fewer instances of out-of-seat behavior.

Source: Greene eet al., 1981

Putnam et al. (2003) implemented a positive reinforcement intervention in which bus drivers passed out “caught being good” cards to students depending on their behavior on the buses. Each card identified an individual student and bus number; the cards were collected and entered into a lottery, with the winners receiving small prices (donated by local merchants) and “free time.” Each week also, the bus with the fewest disciplinary referrals was recognized as “bus of the week.” This study was conducted for longer than two school years, so readers can see the persistence of the effects in the following figure.

Source: Putnam et al., 2003

Additional guidance

There are other articles that provide explicit guidance. For example, Kennedy and King (2019) provided a rich description of how to implement the principles of PBIS for improving behavior on school buses. Their example translates to practice readily. That’s just one of 18 studies included in a literature reviewed published by King et al. (2019); King and colleagues noted that overall the results were “modest” and did not meet the standards of quality promulgated by the Council for Exceptional Children, but that they did provide implications for implementation of behavior management strategies by drivers.

Thus, it’s important not to consider these procedures as providing an open-and-shut case for how to handle misbehavior on school buses. There is enough evidence to point toward potentially beneficial practices. However, educators who want to implement them should employ means of assessing whether they work (just as one should with promising instructional practices in, say, math or reading).

Sources

Allen, M., Young, E. L., Ashbaker, B. Y., Heaton, E., & Parkinson, M. (2003). Sexual harassment on the school bus: Supporting and preparing bus drivers to respond appropriately. Journal of School Violence, 2(4), 101-109. https://doi.org/10.1300/J202v02n04_06

Chiang, S. J., Iwata, B. A., & Dorsey, M. F. (1979). Elimination of disruptive bus riding behavior via token reinforcement on a "distance-based" schedule. Education and Treatment of Children, 2(2), 101-109. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42898471

Collins, J., & Ryan, J. B. (2016). Extension of positive behavioral interventions and supports from the school to the bus: A case study. The Journal of At-risk Issues, 19(1), 29. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ1104428

deLara, E. W. (2008) Bullying and aggression on the school bus: School bus drivers' observations and suggestions, Journal of School Violence, 7(3), 48-70, https://doi.org/10.1080/15388220801955554

Galliger, C. C, Tisak, M.S., & Tisak, J. (2009). When the wheels on the bus go round: social interactions on the school bus. Social Psychology of Education, 12(1), 43–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11218-008-9072-0

Goodboy, A. K., Martin, M. M., & Brown, E. (2016). Bullying on the school bus: Deleterious effects on public school bus drivers. Journal of Applied Communication Research, 44(4), 434-452. https://doi.org/10.1080/00909882.2016.1225161

Greene, B. F., Bailey, J. S., & Barber, F. (1981). An analysis and reduction of disruptive behavior on school buses. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 14(2), 177-192. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/pmc1308201/

Kennedy, K. J., & King, S. A. (2019). All aboard: Using positive behavior supports on the school bus. Beyond behavior, 28(1), 21-28. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1074295618797272

King, S., Kennedy, K., & Powelson, A. (2019). Behavior management interventions for school buses. Education and Treatment of Children, 42(1), 101-128. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26623025

National Highway Traffic Safety Agency. (n.d.). Student management for school bus drivers: NHTSA school bus driver in-service safety series. Washington, DC. https://www.nhtsa.gov/document/student-management-school-bus-drivers

Putnam, R. F., Handler, M. W., Ramirez‐Platt, C. M., & Luiselli, J. K. (2003). Improving student bus‐riding behavior through a whole‐school intervention. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 36(4), 583-590. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1284472/

Ritschl, C., Mongrella, J., & Presbie, R. J. (1972). Group time-out from rock and roll music and out-of-seat behavior of handicapped children while riding a school bus. Psychological Reports, 31(6) ,967-973. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.2466/pr0.1972.31.3.967

Speake, J. (Ed.). (2015). Oxford dictionary of proverbs (p. 217). Oxford University Press.

Zohor, D., & Lee, J, (2016). Testing the effects of safety climate and disruptive children behavior on school bus drivers performance: A multilevel model. Accident Analysis & Prevention, 95(2), 116-124. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aap.2016.06.016

Footnotes

1. James Armrest reported for the Charlottesville Daily Progress under the heading “Meg Bryce addresses 'elephant in the room' at town hall.” The article appeared 13 September 2023 at https://dailyprogress.com/news/local/government-politics/meg-bryce-addresses-elephant-in-the-room-at-town-hall/article_a09eea80-519b-11ee-a4d9-c7148c607840.html

2. The phrase about one or more rotten apples affecting neighbors was recorded as early as the 1330s according to Speake (2015) and may have Latin roots. I didn’t find an entry in either or my two (literal) books about idioms, but see the Mirriam Webster entry https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/one-bad-apple-spoil-the-barrel-metaphor-phrase for more and the FreeDictioniary’s entry https://idioms.thefreedictionary.com/rotten+apple+spoils+the+barrel

3. Technically, this should probably be called a negative punishment procedure, but that’s a post for another day