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WEST JORDAN — Marcus Swainston was sweating the course.
"It was extremely challenging," the 26-year-old driver said. "Everything is so tight with a vehicle that size. It's tough."
Swainston takes his day job seriously, especially because it involves the lives of hundreds of Utah schoolchildren. He's a bus driver for the Jordan School District and he believes safety matters most.
"When I see people run my reds, that's the scariest part of my job," he said, referring to the flashing red lights on his bus. "That could've been one of my kids. Sometimes you feel like they're your kids. You really get to know them picking them up every day throughout the school year."
The kids are the most valuable part of the job of a bus driver, said Murrell Martin, pupil transportation specialist at the Utah State Office of Education. He said perhaps the greatest skill for a bus driver to hone is safely loading and unloading the children.
"That's one they cannot make mistakes on," Martin said.
The Jordan School District hosted the state's annual Safety Skill Competition for bus drivers Saturday, and about 24 of the state's nearly 3,000 drivers vied for top recognition, a coveted position and an opportunity to compete in regional and national competitions.
Most of the competitors this year were driving the tightly regulated course, officiated by the Utah Highway Patrol, for the first time.
"It's a good learning experience," said Robert Leinbach, who works as a substitute teacher and bus driver in the Jordan School District. He said there's a lot of skill to driving a nearly 40-foot-long, 10-foot-wide bus around town.
"You've got to keep your cool while the kids may be distracting, and you've got to learn how to maneuver that bus," said Leinbach, a retired public information officer.
Many of the features of a school bus — tall, padded seats, small, rectangle-shaped windows and the bright yellow-orange exterior color, for example — are built in to increase the safety of students riding the bus, said Steve Lewis, president of the Lewis Bus Group, a local dealer of Thomas school buses and a sponsor of Saturday's competition.
As nationally mandated, he said, buses don't have seat belts, in order to help speed things along in case of a necessary evacuation.
Lewis said seasoned bus drivers and district transportation directors help with ongoing refinement of the product. And while people might not think buses have changed much over the years, they are constantly updated, he said.
The drivers must undergo recertification and continued training every year to comply with safety standards set by the state and nation. Many districts hold their own competitions to help drivers meet their task of keeping kids safe while in transit to and from school and other activities.
"It's helping the community, and that's important to me," Leinbach said.
Martin said there's a high turnover rate of bus drivers in the state, but that's to be expected with only part-time hours offered in most positions and a low unemployment rate in Utah. He said the most important skills needed to do the job are having a love of kids and being serious about safety.
"They're people too," Swainston said. "They're little people, but they're people just the same."
Seeing his elementary transports "still excited about everything," Swainston said, takes him back to the days when he was in school, which makes his job that much more fun.
"I never would've seen myself in this job, but I love it," he said.
Leinbach, Swainston and Brent Welker, each from Jordan School District, won in the novice category; Gary Guest, of Alpine School District, Nicole Gunderson, of Wasatch, and Lonnie Snyder, of Jordan, won in the intermediate category; and Roxan Harper, of Alpine, Debra Sorenson, of Wasatch, and William Clark, of Canyons, won in the expert category.
Harper received the most points and won the overall competition, and the opportunity to go to North Carolina in June to participate in the international bus driver safety competition. It is the second consecutive year she has won the title.
