Electric school buses are all the rage and Montgomery County Public Schools has gotten national attention for their supposed plan to convert their entire school bus fleet to electric buses.
But who owns the electric school buses that Montgomery County children are riding on?
When the Board of Education was buying diesel school buses the diesel school buses were owned by the Board of Education. But the electric school bus scheme the Board of Education signed up for at the insistence of their former Department of Transportation Director Todd Watkins (Mr. Watkins' sentencing is this week.) does not have the Board of Education buying the electric school buses. Instead, the scheme involves a shell corporation called HET MCPS, LLC. putting school buses on Montgomery County roads.
DETROIT — The head of the National Transportation Safety Board expressed concern Wednesday about the safety risks that heavy electric vehicles pose if they collide with lighter vehicles.
The official, Jennifer Homendy, raised the issue in a speech in Washington to the Transportation Research Board. She noted, by way of example, that an electric GMC Hummer weighs about 9,000 pounds (4,000 kilograms), with a battery pack that alone is 2,900 pounds (1,300 kilograms) — roughly the entire weight of a typical Honda Civic.
"I'm concerned about the increased risk of severe injury and death for all road users from heavier curb weights and increasing size, power, and performance of vehicles on our roads, including electric vehicles," Homendy said in remarks prepared for the group.
The extra weight that EVs typically carry stems from the outsize mass of their batteries. To achieve 300 or more miles (480 or more kilometers) of range per charge from an EV, batteries have to weigh thousands of pounds...
A Baltimore jury awarded $5 million this week to the family of a 9-year-old boy who severely broke his leg during a schoolyard football game but was provided only mustard and a washcloth to bite on by public school personnel who neglected to call 911 and left a voicemail for his mother, according to the lawsuit.
Upon hearing the message, Jacob Harvey’s mother drove to Furley Elementary School and sped her son – who had gone into shock – to Good Samaritan Hospital. From there, Jacob was transferred to the University of Maryland’s R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center, where he underwent emergency surgery, according to testimony during the Baltimore City Circuit Court trial...
...The jury awarded the $5 million in non-economic damages Monday against Baltimore City Public Schools after finding the negligence of BCPS employees at Furley caused and exacerbated Jacob’s injuries. The award, however, could be reduced to $100,000 and will likely not exceed $785,000 due to Maryland’s statutory caps on non-economic damages...
...BCPS issued a statement Thursday that “while City Schools does not comment on the details of pending litigation, we are reviewing the jury verdict and determining next steps, including a request to modify the amount of the verdict so that it is consistent with state law. In Maryland, school systems are not liable for any amount exceeding $100,000 for injuries like this one that occurred prior to October 2016.”..
...The settlement between the University of Maryland, College Park, and the family of Jordan McNair is believed to be one of the largest college athletics-related settlements in the state.
McNair, a Baltimore County resident, was 19 when he collapsed while participating in spring drills with the Terps football team. He was hospitalized and died two weeks later...
On Richard Montgomery High School’s Artificial Turf
Good evening members of the Board of Education and Superintendent Smith. You may remember at the CIP hearings in November a student from Richard
Montgomery who plays on the soccer team as a goalie, Molly Winchenbach. She
testified about the unusual abrasiveness of RM’s new artificial turf field and the
resulting injuries suffered by student athletes. She is my daughter. She would be
here tonight to give you this update and make this plea herself, but she is at practice. High school athletes never seem to have a season off these days.
To MCPS’s credit, after Molly’s testimony, they sent out samples of RM’s and Whitman’s artificial turf for independent testing to a lab in Canada. Both
fields had been installed at the same time using the same organic Zeofill rock/sand mix but their effect on the athletes was drastically different with RM’s field causing substantially more serious abrasion injuries. That different experience of
the athletes was confirmed by the objective tests. Although in my meeting with the Director of Construction and Director of Athletics back in February to go over the results of the tests, I was not permitted to keep a copy, I wrote down the pertinent
results right after the meeting, so my numbers are within a few points. There was agreement in the room that the results were shocking. The abrasiveness of the field
was measured against FIFA’s standard of 30.
Old crumb rubber fields tested a 3.
Whitman’s field tested a 20. RM’s field tested 128! Four times the FIFA standard! The lab tests also figured out why – the volcanic rock particles used in the RM field Zeofill were much larger than those used at Whitman, and at RM, the rock was layered with the sand like a cake, rather than all mixed together, as it was at Whitman.
Now that MCPS has verified what we have been saying all along – there is
something very wrong with the RM turf – it is so abrasive, it is tearing the skin off the athletes, what are you going to do about it? MCPS thought that perhaps they
had solved the problem for this spring. They had removed some of the fill and
tried to mix up the layers more by deep tining it. The plan then was to just replace
the offending larger particle fill with the smaller particle fill gradually with regular
monthly maintenance. But, I’m here to tell you, on behalf of my daughter and the
other student athletes who are using and will be using this field in the fall
regularly, that MCPS’s remediation plan is not aggressive enough. I’ve provided
you with a picture of what happened to Molly’s leg the first time she slid on the
turf this spring to stop a ball coming into the goal. The RM turf scraped off the top layer of about 6 inches of her skin. This cannot be the conditions under which you
expect student athletes to play. While all athletes may not experience the
abrasiveness of the RM field the same, it is particularly damaging to the students,
like Molly in positions, like goalie, who have to slide on the turf all the time. She
plays on turf all over the county, both indoor and outdoor, and only receives
serious injuries like this from the RM turf.
I understand that MCPS is in the process of asking the manufacturer of the
turf how much it will cost to replace all or most of the fill in RM’s turf all at once
over the summer. I am asking you to ensure this remediation gets done
immediately. (And any cost should not come out of CIP funds already allocated
to capital expenditures for RM, which needs substantial expansion over the
summer just to keep up with its ever growing student population.) You owe it to
the students whose health and safety you say are your top priority. You now know this turf is 4x the standard for abrasiveness, you know the reasons why it is so abrasive, and you know what you need to do to fix it. Don’t waste anymore time while more students get hurt. Do it now.
Thank you.
At the November 8, 2018, Montgomery County Board of Education public hearing on school facilities a Richard Montgomery High School student gave public comment about the injuries caused by the new artificial turf at the school. Watch her statement below.
The Board of Education calls this a "best practice."
The Board of Education used $562,721 of Operating Budget funds to pay for this artificial turf. That means they sacrificed teacher salaries to pay for this new field. They did not use Capital Budget (bricks and mortar) funds. There is no money available to replace this field again.
Students will need to buy more bandages.
After a 9-year-old boy was crushed to death by a motorized room partition in his Northern Virginia school this spring, a News4 consumer investigation found that nearly 500 of the partitions are located in schools in the D.C. area.
Of the 21 school districts that have the powerful devices, 17 districts had no formal, written policies on who is allowed to operate them...
...The mother of Taylor Walton, a 14-year-old Gaithersburg High School student, filed the lawsuit after Taylor’s death in 2015 after an asthma attack in gym class.
The complaint claims that Taylor started having trouble breathing during her gym class on Nov. 30, 2015, and asked permission to get her inhaler out of her locker. Her gym teacher wouldn’t let her leave class after two requests.
Taylor later left the class without permission and was found unconscious near the gymnasium a short time later, according to court filings.
The federal complaint claimed that two Gaithersburg High School teachers were grossly negligent in refusing Taylor’s requests to leave class to get an inhaler and violated her civil rights by denying her permission to leave, and that the Board of Education was negligent in hiring and supervising employees...
The picture to the left shows a section of the Somerset Elementary School playground where the artificial turf is coming apart at a seam.
The picture below shows the temperature of the Somerset Elementary School artificial turf playground on July 14th. Should children be playing on a surface that is 146 degrees? Do the children go out for recess when the field is 146 degrees during the school year?
The Somerset Elementary School parents were allowed by the Board of Education to raise money to put in their own artificial turf field. Who is going to be funding the repairs to this two year old artificial grass field?
