Follow the adventures of Calvin, an anxious but dutiful bus driver, and his sentient and safety-conscious school bus named Christina. The short story follows Calvin’s route adventures while highlighting very real circumstances that drivers face and underscoring the importance of student transportation safety. Find group discussion prompts at the end of each article. The story advisor is Fredrick Tottenham, student safety specialist with Irving ISD in Texas.

“Alright, girl, I’m going to need your help with this one,” I whisper to the dash. My stomach twists. Why does confronting teenagers make me such a nervous wreck?

The students are all aboard, absorbed in social media feeds and the latest high school gossip—everyone except Thomas and Stephen, who can barely hold their heads up. I swallow the lump in my throat and ignore the curious stares as I make my way toward them.

“Hey, Mr. Calvin. See somethin’ you like?” Thomas slurs.

“With glasses that thick, I’m sure he does!” Stephen shouts.

The bus erupts in laughter, and suddenly I’m back in ninth-grade English, fourth period, with Ms. Fannin. She had called on me to read from the lesson, and for one brief, shining moment, I thought I was impressing the prom queen. Then Bentley—the class clown—snatched my glasses from my face, slipped them on, and joked that the lenses were as thick as a fishbowl. He earned detention and the laughter of the entire class. I earned a nickname: Cal the Clown Fish.

“Alright, guys,” I say, forcing confidence into my voice, “What’s going on? More importantly, have you been drinking anything you shouldn’t be drinking?”

The boys trade a quick glance, silently agreeing to keep up the act. Thomas drops his head into his hands while Stephen crosses his arms and turns toward the window. I give them one last chance to come clean. When neither responds, I warn them that my next step will be to contact the authorities. Still, neither one moves.

I return to the front of the bus, pick up the radio, and call Dispatch.

“Route 7568 to Dispatch.”

“Dispatch here. Go ahead, Route 7568.”

“I have a code 9-32.”

“10-4, 7568. Call Dispatch directly for further assistance.”

I call Dispatch directly, and Ms. Debbie answers.

“Hi, Mr. Calvin. I’m relieved Sasha is safe and the police have cleared the area. You reported an emergency over the radio. Is that correct?”

“Yes. Thank you, Ms. Debbie. And, uh, I have a problem on my bus.”

I rub the back of my neck and glance toward Thomas and Stephen while I explain what’s happening. Ms. Debbie listens carefully, then says she’ll contact an administrator at Townsend High and notify the authorities.

I sigh and glance back at the boys. They have no idea how much trouble they’re in.

Then Christina’s dash pings:

CANS

A moment later, it pings again:

BACKPACKS

How could Christina possibly know what was inside their bags? Then again, she seems to notice everything. Which is ridiculous, of course—Christina doesn’t have eyes. Or does she?

A sharp knock strikes the folding doors. An officer reaches for the exterior handle and pulls it hard. The doors fold outward with a screech, and two officers climb aboard, their boots thudding against the steps. Christina shifts beneath their weight as a wave of hot, humid air rolls through the doorway, carrying the scent of sunbaked pavement. Around me, the students’ chatter fades row by row until the bus falls silent.

“Hello, sir. I’m Officer Wilmer and this is my partner, Officer Hutchins. We were dispatched by request of Ervens ISD on a report of public intoxication of a student.”

I introduce myself to the officers and tell them that the students are hiding booze in their backpacks. When Thomas and Stephen hear this, they both aggressively object.

“You ain’t even looked in my bag, Mr. Calvin,” Stephen protests. “You don’t know what’s in there!”

“Is that right? Well, open your backpacks and let us look inside,” Officer Hutchins demands.

The officers motion for the boys to hand over their backpacks and then begin searching them. It doesn’t take long. From the bags, they pull a mix of empty and unopened beer cans. With the evidence in plain sight, the officers order Thomas and Stephen to stand and escort them off the bus.

With their heads hanging, the boys sober up to the reality of what they’ve done. They may face suspension from transportation, suspension from school, and whatever charges may result from their actions. I thank the officers and close the doors behind them while the rest of the students whisper and stare out the windows as Thomas and Stephen are led to the patrol vehicle.

“Alright, everyone, I think we’ve all learned a lesson here, haven’t we? Let’s take our seats and put on our seat belts,” I say, feeling a bit more confident.

I hear the students shuffle into their seats and hear their seat belts click into place.

Click.

Click.

Click.

The familiar sound echoes through Christina’s cabin. I glance into the student mirror, scanning the rows of seated students, and every belt I can see appears secure.

Satisfied, I turn forward, fasten my seat belt, and push in the parking brake, ready to put Christina in gear. Before I can pull away, Christina’s dash pings, as if she knows exactly what I’m thinking:

NOT SO FAST

I glance back into the student mirror, adjust it, and spot a student near the rear. She glares at me with her arms folded, her seat belt hanging at her side. I signal for her to fasten her seatbelt, but she only scoffs.

What a route.

In one afternoon, I’ve faced more than enough: The false but still terrifying alarm of an active shooter at Sasha’s workplace, my own near-miss in safety at the crosswalk, and two inebriated students being escorted off the bus by the authorities. Now, after all that, one student is refusing to fasten her seat belt. For her safety, I know I can’t move the bus. I run both hands through my hair, remove my glasses, and rub my eyes and face.

Some days, transporting students is simple. Other days, it feels impossibly complicated. Right now, I can’t tell if I’m driving a bus or clinging to the front seat of a roller coaster, bracing for every twist, turn, and unexpected drop.

Christina’s dash chirps once more:

BUCKLE UP.

Ask Your Team:
What signs might indicate that a student is under the influence of alcohol or another substance, and how would you work with Dispatch to keep all students safe?

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Next Stop:
Episode 4
Click It or Risk It! – Seatbelt Safety: Ensure every student is buckled up before the bus moves.

Previous Stop: Episode 2
The Yellow Brick Line

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© 2026 Gabrielle Marie Kelley. Calvin & Christina: Where Safety Takes the Wheel and all associated characters, concepts, and illustrations are the intellectual property of Gabrielle Marie Kelley, office manager for the Irving Independent School District transportation department. Published with permission through School Transportation News.

The post Episode 3: Sip, Sip, No Way! appeared first on School Transportation News.

A school bus driver was removed from a Massachusetts school district’s routes after reportedly throwing several empty liquor bottles from a bus window while transporting students Tuesday morning, reported Coastal ABC News.

Somerset Berkley Regional High School officials informed families that a motorist traveling behind the school bus saw several empty miniature liquor bottles, commonly known as “nips,” being thrown from a window during the morning pickup route. The witness reported the incident to the Somerset Police Department.

Police officers located and stopped the bus. The driver admitted discarding the bottles and cooperated with the ensuing investigation.

Authorities determined that the bottles belonged to the busdriver but had not been consumed Tuesday morning. Officials also said the driver was not impaired.

“SPD engaged with the driver, who cooperated with the investigation, and it was determined that the bottles were in her possession, but they were not consumed this morning, and she was not impaired in any way,” school officials stated via the article.

Fisher Bus, the district’s transportation contractor, dispatched a replacement bus following the police response. The 14 students on board the original bus were transferred and transported safely to Somerset Berkley Regional High School. No injuries were reported.

The school subsequently asked Fisher Bus not to assign the driver to any of the district’s transportation routes. Officials did not identify the driver or indicate whether she could face criminal charges or disciplinary action from the bus company.

“The presence of alcohol containers on a school bus, by anyone, is unacceptable,” the school stated via the news report. “Our students and families must have complete confidence in the people responsible for transporting them, and we take this matter very seriously.”

School officials also thanked the motorist who contacted authorities and the officers who responded. “We are grateful to the attentive community member who reported what they saw and to the Somerset Police Department for their swift response,” the district reportedly stated.

Additional information about the origin of the bottles and how long they had been aboard the bus was not immediately available.

Written with the assistance of AI.

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Related: Reasonable Suspicion Training on Driver Alcohol, Drug Use Comes to Reno
Related: Former School Bus Driver Charged With 37 Felony Counts After DUI
Related: New York School Bus Driver Caught Drinking Alcohol While Driving
Related: West Virginia School Bus Driver Indicted For DUI

The post Massachusetts School Bus Driver Questioned After Discarding Empty Liquor Bottles Out Window appeared first on School Transportation News.

Reading Time: 5 minutes

Wisconsin Watch has documented the deadly toll of Wisconsin’s drinking culture, from liver disease and alcohol poisoning to crashes involving impaired drivers. 

But one alcohol-related danger receives far less attention — and it doesn’t end when someone hands over the car keys: walking while intoxicated.

Police reported suspected alcohol use among nearly 1 in 5 pedestrians killed in Wisconsin crashes between 2017 and 2025. Because pedestrians are not routinely tested, researchers say the true share may be higher.

The pattern is not unique to Wisconsin. Nationwide in 2024, 27% of pedestrians killed in traffic crashes were alcohol-impaired, compared with 15% of drivers involved in fatal pedestrian crashes, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

The figures do not make the danger of walking drunk comparable to driving drunk: An impaired driver controls a fast-moving vehicle and endangers others. But they underscore the risks intoxicated pedestrians face.

“We always hear somebody talking about having a safe plan home, have one sober driver. Maybe you should have a sober walker if you’re walking home,” said Vera Elle, a researcher at Wellbrook Recovery, a Brookfield-based alcohol and substance recovery rehabilitation center. She and her colleague Shimmy Stregosky wrote a series of reports on the topic and brought the issue to Wisconsin Watch’s attention.

Alcohol-related pedestrian crashes fall from 2019 peak

The number of annual crashes involving drunk pedestrians dropped from a 2019 peak of 126 to 101 in 2025. Annual deaths in those crashes plunged from 15 to five during the same period.

That trend coincided with lower reported binge drinking, defined as four or more drinks for women and five or more for men on a single occasion, said Maureen Busalacchi, director of the Wisconsin Alcohol Policy Project at the Medical College of Wisconsin. 

She cautioned that the data cannot establish that changing drinking habits caused fewer pedestrian crashes. Traffic volume, remote work and vehicle speeds also affect crash frequency. 

“The use of alcohol is going down, and then you start to see changes in perceived health effects. So more people are starting to see it as bad for health than they have in the past,” Busalacchi said.

Nationally, Gallup found that 54% of adults reported consuming alcohol in 2025, a record low in its polling. The share of adults ages 18 to 34 who considered moderate drinking harmful rose from 34% in 2018 to 66% in 2025.

In Wisconsin, the state’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System estimates a similar trend: The share of adults reporting binge drinking fell from 21.9% in 2019 to 19.1% in 2024.

Alcohol-related crashes span age groups

From 2017 through 2025, 16 pedestrians ages 35 to 39 were killed in Wisconsin crashes in which police suspected they consumed alcohol, according to a Wisconsin Watch analysis of Wisconsin Department of Transportation data. 

That was the highest death toll of any five-year age group. Pedestrians ages 30 to 34 had the second-highest total, with 11 deaths, followed by those ages 25 to 29 and 50 to 54, with 10 each. Overall, 78 of the 96 pedestrians killed were ages 20 to 59.

Across crashes of all injury severity, pedestrians in their 20s accounted for the most cases involving suspected alcohol use. The total was highest among those ages 20 to 24, followed by those ages 25 to 29. But the numbers remained relatively high across most age groups from 30 to 59. Most pedestrians in those crashes suffered injuries.

The data showed a stark difference in injury severity: 44.6% of pedestrians suspected of alcohol use were seriously or fatally injured, compared with 21.1% of those without suspected alcohol use. 

However, the connection does not establish that alcohol alone caused the difference. Nor can the data show how much more likely an intoxicated person is to be struck because no reliable count exists of how many intoxicated and sober people walk Wisconsin’s roads.

The figures are also likely to understate how many pedestrians involved in crashes had been drinking, said Richard Blomberg, vice president of the research firm Dunlap Research. 

His research found that police generally identified alcohol use reliably when they checked the “had been drinking” box on crash reports. But an unchecked box did not mean a pedestrian was sober because police were less likely to document alcohol use when signs were unclear.

Research shows alcohol’s role in pedestrian crashes

Adults who had been drinking, especially those doing so excessively, were heavily overrepresented among pedestrians struck by vehicles, Blomberg found in a study he designed in the 1970s. About half of the adult pedestrian victims had been drinking, and nearly one-quarter had a blood alcohol level of 0.20% or higher.

Blomberg also compared crash victims with a random sample of pedestrians walking on the street near the crash sites. The researchers assembled three control groups. Some pedestrians were sampled at the same locations, days and times as previous crashes, while others were sampled at 112 randomly selected locations across New Orleans. The comparisons allowed Blomberg to estimate the extent to which alcohol was overrepresented among crash victims.

Blomberg also found alcohol-involved victims were disproportionately middle-aged men and more likely to have arrest records. Their crashes clustered at night and on weekends. 

Blomberg cautioned that findings in one city did not represent the entire country, even if New Orleans was reasonably similar to other urban areas. Almost half a century later, he found the same demographic overrepresented in an analysis of crash data from five states from 2007 to 2017.

Later studies examined a related but different question: whether alcohol was associated with more severe injuries once a pedestrian was struck. In a study published in 1995, Dr. James Williams of Memorial Medical Center in Savannah, Georgia, reviewed autopsies of 223 pedestrian fatalities. He found that alcohol-involved pedestrians were more likely to suffer more severe injuries than sober pedestrians when struck by vehicles. Because the study included only fatalities, it did not measure whether intoxicated pedestrians were more likely to die after being struck.

A Florida analysis published a year later, however, found that pedestrians classified by police as under the influence had four to five times the adjusted odds of dying from a collision as pedestrians not classified as such. Rebecca Miles-Doan, the analysis’ author, cautioned that the finding might overestimate the association because police tend to conduct more intensive investigations into fatal cases. 

Using more recent data from 2011 to 2016, University of Tennessee researchers found that alcohol was identified in about 7% of Tennessee pedestrian crashes but in 22% of pedestrian fatalities. The researchers pointed to limitations of their study: Few crashes had BAC readings, and alcohol classifications relied heavily on police judgment.

Experts point to public health solutions

Unlike impaired driving, walking while intoxicated generally is not a crime in Wisconsin. The Legislature eliminated the crime of public intoxication in 1973, which critics said created a “revolving door” through the criminal justice system for lower-income people and did little to improve rehabilitation — and sometimes worsened it.

Experts interviewed for this story also do not view criminalization as a principal solution. 

Cities elsewhere have experimented with less punitive measures to improve safety. Baltimore launched the “Walk Smart Baltimore” campaign at the turn of the century. Blomberg participated as a researcher. 

The campaign tested measures that did not depend entirely on intoxicated pedestrians making safe decisions. The city distributed reflective hats and used television, radio, billboards and flyers to warn pedestrians of dangers.

The evaluation reported fewer pedestrian crashes in the target area, although Blomberg said the program required resources that made it difficult for other communities to replicate.

“We can wrap them in cotton and potentially keep them from being injured in a crash or in a fall, but the health effects of that excess alcohol use are still there,” Blomberg said. “If we solve the underlying alcohol problem, everything else goes away.”

Addressing excessive alcohol use is the long-term goal, Blomberg said, but communities should not wait to reduce immediate risks through other efforts including safer vehicle designs, separating pedestrians from traffic or other measures. 

If a street redesign, safer ride home or other intervention reduces alcohol-involved pedestrian crashes by even 5% or 10%, he said, “then of course we should do it.”

DataWatch: The overlooked risks of walking while intoxicated is a post from Wisconsin Watch, a non-profit investigative news site covering Wisconsin since 2009. Please consider making a contribution to support our journalism.

In 2000, 667 people were in prisons for OWI convictions, according to the report. That number reached a record high of 2,899 in 2024 before falling slightly to 2,750 last year.

The post The number of people in Wisconsin prisons for OWIs has more than quadrupled since 2000 appeared first on WPR.