School bus drivers hone their skills at Roadeos

Parallel parking, avoiding sharp turns and backing up into a stall is hard enough in an average vehicle. But members of the Newport-Mesa Roadeo Team do this regularly with a 40-foot school bus — for some, it’s a prize-worthy skill.

For over 20 years, employees under the Newport-Mesa Unified School District’s Transportation Department have competed as a team in school bus safety Roadeos, tournaments held throughout the state that test the skills of California’s certified bus drivers.

For these competitions, contestants take their school bus through obstacle courses and complete written exams on the vehicle’s rules and safety regulations.

The Roadeos are held by chapters of the California Assn. of School Transportation Officials, an organization dedicated to hosting events that promote bus safety.

The district’s Safety and Training Supervisor Norm Turner and Delegated Behind the Wheel Trainer Victor Garza have spent the past several years recruiting employees to volunteer for the team.

Newport-Mesa’s team this year, including coaches Turner and Garza, consisted of bus drivers Jose Hernandez, Hope Nguyen, Noe Ocha-Rodriguez, Alfredo Salgado, Ricardo Sandoval, Juliann Scheafer, Cheryl Selph, Marilyn Thompson and Jackie Williams.

The band of bus drivers journeyed on their own time to eight different tournaments this past Roadeo season. Since March, the troop traveled to Bakersfield, Cabazon, Galt, Gardena, Phelan, Placentia, San Diego County and San Mateo County.

Their mode of transportation? It was none other than their own trusty district school buses.

“There was a lot of driving,” Garza said. “But hey, that’s what we do.”

The team holds fundraisers to cover certain expenses during Roadeo travels.

The district’s Transportation Director Pete Meslin approves the drivers to take the buses on these trips.

Each Roadeo has seven events for the obstacle course portion. These include making right and left turns while landing the front and back wheels directly on top of rectangles marked on the ground. Should the wheels land more than two inches away from the rectangle’s lines, the driver will lose points.

Others involve maneuvering the giant vehicle through an “offset alley,” which are sets of gates that create a jagged path, without touching the flags on the gates and parallel parking into a 46-foot space.

The events present an even bigger challenge by giving the drivers time limits and strict rules on stopping.

“For some events, you can’t stop once you’ve started moving,” Turner said. “The judges will look at the lug nuts [on the wheels] to make sure you’re not stopping. You’ll lose points if you do.”

Garza, who has competed in Roadeos for four years now, and Turner, who has also competed for over a decade, trained their drivers in the bus yard outside the district’s Transportation Department. They ran practices after school and Saturdays on their own time.

“I took one driver out into the yard and we practiced until it was dark out,” Turner said with a laugh. “He told me, ‘If they ever have a Roadeo in the dark, we’re going to win because we’ve been out here so long.’”

While participating on the team is voluntary for the district’s drivers, the two Roadeo coaches encouraged them to take the opportunity as a way to improve their driving skills.

“The places you’re most likely to get in an accident is on a field trip because it’ll be a place you’ve never taken the bus before,” Turner said. “But I felt like I knew exactly what to do in those situations because of the Roadeo.”

The season has been a successful one and included a first-place title at the state and international tournaments.

Drivers also took home honors such as first place in both the professional category and the teams category at the Phelan Roadeo in April and trophies from the Orange County Roadeo at Placentia in March.

In May, Garza took first place at the State Championship Roadeo in Galt, earning him a spot at the 45th annual School Bus Driver International Safety Competition held in Minneapolis this past July — to which he opted to travel by plane.

The tournament, organized by the National School Transportation Assn., invited around 80 drivers from across the United States and Canada. After completing a 50-question exam on bus regulations and maneuvering a school bus through a 10-event road course, Garza took home first place for the transit category.

The team’s trophies from past Roadeos are kept in a classroom at the transportation department where the district’s new drivers are trained. The awards are placed there for a little bit of gentle motivation for incoming drivers, Garza and Turner said.

“You’re not going to make millions of dollars being a bus driver but you can definitely take pride in what you do,” Garza said.

Next year’s international competition will be held in Greensboro, N.C. The 2016 Roadeo season in California will start in February.

But in the meantime, Garza and Turner are prepping their drivers for the latest mission — the first day of school.