New PASS Guide Helps Districts Assess School Transportation Safety
A new PASS guide helps districts assess school transportation safety, with related NCSSD insights on driver training and dismissal procedures.
The Partner Alliance for Safer Schools (PASS), a nonprofit partner of the National Council of School Safety Directors (NCSSD), has released a white paper to help districts assess transportation safety across bus routes, school campuses, and off-site activities.
The guide examines how districts and transportation contractors divide responsibilities and how school leaders can verify that safety procedures work across routes and campuses.
School Transportation Safety and Security: A Tiered Assessment and Improvement Guide includes a matrix of 68 controls organized into four tiers and seven categories. The categories cover policies and procedures, personnel and training, physical design, communication, access control, video surveillance and incident review, and student supervision.
School safety and transportation leaders can use the matrix to examine questions such as how drivers and dispatchers communicate during a disruption, whether contractor training aligns with district expectations, and how schools account for students when dismissal plans change.
PASS recommends starting with foundational practices and checking how consistently they work across routes and campuses. The guide suggests observing arrival and dismissal, conducting supervisory ride-alongs, testing communications, and reviewing near misses or recurring complaints. Those findings can help districts decide where additional training, staffing, or equipment is warranted.
For each gap, the guide also asks districts to identify who will address it, set a target date, and determine how they’ll verify that the change worked.
Read the PASS White Paper and Explore the Assessment Matrix
How NCSSD Members Are Approaching Transportation Safety
Transportation safety was one of six themes in School Security Leadership’s 2026 Q2 School Security Intelligence Report. The report examined how transportation fits into district emergency planning, daily campus operations, and coordination with public safety partners.
In one NCSSD discussion, a member described how their district includes bus drivers in emergency preparedness training. Drivers learn the Standard Response Protocol and then work through tabletop exercises involving situations they could encounter on a route, such as a medical emergency or a vehicle fire.
NCSSD members have also discussed how to respond when families raise concerns about new arrival and dismissal procedures. One school safety leader described how a school in his district separated buses, cars, and pedestrians and introduced numbered car tags to verify pickups. As he prepared for questions about longer waits, he had a concrete figure to share. Dismissal took 50 minutes on the first day and 25 minutes by the following Monday.
For districts reviewing emergency procedures with transportation staff, NCSSD member Chris Weedin also shared a one-page guide covering emergency notifications, evacuation decisions, and accounting for students.