There's no evidence metro Atlanta school districts use data collected on bus accidents to make students safer as they are carried to and from school daily.
Atlanta Public Schools and Cobb County Schools make the job harder: neither keeps enough data that experts suggest could leave them vulnerable to constantly repeating bad habits.
Cobb County Schools' Open Records Clerk Kelly Moore said the district submits bus accident data to the Georgia Department of Education. Apparently, though, not all the data is kept in-house. After the information is manually entered into the state database, data is kept on different electronic spreadsheets.
On the database of raw data received from the state’s second largest school district, none of the nine fields of data was labeled. The only data easily discernible were the driver’s name and the accident date. Information not provided in the database included the type of accident, the driver’s age, whether the driver was cited for the accident and how many students were on the bus when the accident occurred.
Atlanta Public Schools hasn't kept accurate records for the accidents it reports to the state. Records received from the district included only accidents from July 2015 to June 2016 and differed from the state database in the number of incidents, with none being recorded from 2012 to 2015. Officials say the district has complied with state requirements.
“Although a second copy for the (missing) years noted was not kept, the data was still uploaded,” APS Research Assistant Brigetta Perry said via email. “Measures have been put into place to ensure that a department copy is kept going forward.”
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