GREENE – Beth Hutchinson sees it happen every week.

The school bus rumbles down Route 202 and pulls over to drop off her 8-year-old son, Tyler. With red lights flashing and an extended stop sign, the doors open. The boy starts to get off.

Suddenly, a car – or two or three – pulls around the school bus and speeds away.

“It’s an accident waiting to happen,” Hutchinson said. “It just blows my mind every time they go by.”

Across the state, experts say drivers are passing stopped school buses every day, sometimes barely missing children as they board the bus or cross the street.

And they believe the problem is getting worse.

“People just don’t seem to want to follow the law,” said Kevin Mallory, transportation director for the Portland school system and president of the Maine Association for Pupil Transportation. “Everybody’s got a place to go. Fast.”

‘That extra minute’

According to the Maine Bureau of Highway Safety, no child has been killed by a car passing a stopped school bus since 1996, the last year that such records are available. It is unclear when the last student was injured.

But Mallory and Harvey Boatman, transportation specialist for the Maine Department of Education, said they hear about “near misses” all the time.

“We’ve had some very close calls,” said Boatman.

In Portland on Wednesday afternoon, a car nearly hit a Portland first-grader as he was getting off the bus, Mallory said. The car passed the bus on the right – the same side as the bus door- just as the boy was about to get off. The driver had to shut the door in the boy’s face, Mallory said, or he would have stepped directly into the path of the car.

“Had he not seen that car, the kid would have been killed,” Mallory said. “These laws are in place for a reason.”

An informal study by the association last spring showed that most of the 23 districts surveyed had problems with cars passing stopped school buses. For some it happened only once a week. One school district said it happened 90 times during the weeklong survey. The districts were not identified by name in the survey.

Portland school officials used the survey results to estimate that more than 3,000 cars would pass 24 buses in a year.

“In the world we live in today, everybody’s late for something,” said Mallory.

The study showed that urban school systems had the most trouble. But parents and bus officials in rural SAD 52 say the danger is nearly as bad there and growing worse.

“It seems to be everywhere, even in the schoolyard,” said SAD 52 Transportation Director Terrance Klemanski, who oversees school buses in Greene, Leeds and Turner.

At least one car passes a SAD 52 bus every day now, Klemanski said. He believes people don’t like getting stuck behind the lumbering yellow buses, and they seize an opportunity to pass while kids are being picked up and dropped off.

“They don’t want to wait that extra minute,” he said.

Hutchinson was first alarmed last year when one driver nearly ran into another who had stopped for her son’s bus on Route 202. She said a collision would have sent the two vehicles into the school bus just as her son was getting off.

The Androscoggin County Sheriff’s Department sent officers to patrol the area before and after school. “But they cannot sit out there every single day,” she said.

In the past year, the problem has gotten worse. Hutchinson sees cars pass her son’s bus at least once a week. She now drives him to school in the morning.

Police advised Hutchinson to write down the license plate numbers of vehicles she sees pass. But cars speed by too fast for the mother of two to catch the numbers.

She’s thinking about using her camcorder to capture them on videotape.

“I still cannot imagine why people would not stop for a school bus,” she said. “It’s just the danger of this. If not Tyler, then someone is going to get hurt.”

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Klemanski and other Maine transportation directors said their drivers also have problems getting the license plate numbers of cars. But when they do, numbers get faxed to the local sheriff’s office or police department. Drivers and car owners can be fined at least $250. Repeat offenders lose their licenses for 30 days.

The Secretary of State’s Office said more than 130 people had their driver’s licenses suspended last year for passing stopped school buses.

Klemanski sends a couple of license plate numbers each week to police.

“A lot of people say, ‘I didn’t see the lights. I didn’t see the bus,'” he said. “How can you not see the bus?”

All Maine buses have yellow and red flashing lights that warn drivers to stop. Many have one or two red stop signs that extend from the sides. Some have a flashing strobe light on the roof.

Despite that, Dick Perkins, director of the Maine Bureau of Highway Safety, said some drivers don’t even realize it’s a stopped school bus they just passed.

“Unfortunately, the end result, if someone gets hurt, is the same if they were doing it purposely or doing it absent-mindedly,” he said.

To help with the problem in Lewiston, Theresa Samson, owner of Hudson Bus Lines, said her school bus drivers are taught to straddle the line between lanes so cars don’t have room to pass.

In the past 50 years, two children in Lewiston have been hit and killed by cars passing buses, Samson said.

In Portland, officials closed the road that goes past Deering High School so buses could safely drop off and pick up students. They have considered installing video equipment on some buses to record the cars that pass illegally.

And as is the rule in many Maine school systems, they have tried to design bus routes and stops so students don’t have to cross streets to get on or off buses.

“Portland is a tragedy waiting to happen,” said Mallory.

School officials said they don’t know what else to do, except try “putting down that ‘nobody’s gotten killed lately so what’s the problem’ attitude,” Boatman said.

They want drivers to remember why school buses are stopping in the first place.

Said Klemanski, “Think: That could be your student or your brother or your sister on that bus.”

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