I can’t believe it. Yet again I have to watch the corpse of a toddler being carried from a school van. How on earth can you NOT notice that one of the kids you picked up didn’t get off? Now the school claims that he strangled himself with his own necklace. Well, even if he did…how can you not notice that the kid isn’t in school?
Doesn’t anyone mark a roll? Doesn’t anyone say “Where is Didi today?” Sad and no amount of cash will bring the poor little kid back. What sort of suffering must the child have gone through during a 35 degree day locked in a van?
I’d probably kill the school staff it it happened to my girls :fume:
lock the staff in the van for 6 hours. It doesn’t matter how busy you are, you make sure in the morning that you call the parents of the kids that aren’t at school.
AND you open your freakin eyes when you take kids out of the van. I’m SOOOOO angry.
This seriously p!@#es me off. How many little children need to die before they so somehting about this? Isn’t this the second child this year? How much time would it take to call a parent?
I am never, NEVER, letting my kids go to school on the school bus. I know there are a million other things that could happen to them but his is so preventable if someone just put on ounce of effort into it. :fume: 
Sometimes I really get sickened by the lack of peripheral vision around here. Could it be the lack of crime? Back home in South-Africa, there are streetkids and bums all around, trying to steal your wallet or cellphone, or attack you. So most of us know exactly what is going on around us, who is walking behind you etc.
Here people stop in the middle of a shop entrance and stare at clouds, or just turn right into a street without even noticing that there are 44938 scooters about to crash into them and their helmetless kids (the grownups usually wear helmets).
Even I (after almost 5 yrs here) have relaxed in that sense a bit.
Could this be one of the reasons why people don’t scan busses or immediate areas?
Bu this seems just really basic commen sense to me. You open the bus doors, children file off then you walk down the aisle and do a once over. Maybe pick up some trash, a forgotten sweater or wake up a child who fell asleep. What would that take? About 10 seconds.
We have to pick up our kids in a big bus. A teacher is the last one off and sits in the last row.
It is absolutely horrifying that someone could “forget” a child on a small bus. Makes me wonder if they were “punishing” the kid.
I know that last is really speculative. But you’d have to be incredibly stupid or galactically inept to forget a kid on a bus.
Shame. And shame on them.
My heart goes out to the poor parents. What an awful way to lose your child! Not that there is a good way, but to have my own child die because of someone’s criminal negligence would be enough to have me screaming blue bloody murder!
Front page story in today’s Apple Daily (hence, will either make its appearance in the English-language papers tomorrow as old news, if at all.)
Interesting notes from the article:
-The body was discovered when the wa-wa-che pulled up to bring a batch of kids home and another student hopped in the back and discovered the corpse. Have a nice time paying those therapy bills in the future!
-The preschool not only didn’t have a license, they had already been fined by the Taizhong county government twice this year for operating without a license. :bravo:
-One government official said that the most they can do against a school operating without a license is to fine them. They can’t even cut off their water and electricity.
They show everything on TV. The kids getting out in the morning…and then getting back in 6 hours later. You can see the kid going into the back, getting out again to tell a teacher, and a man running in, grabbing the body and running into the school with him.
They blur out the body though…when I arrived here 4.5 yrs ago they showed every little detail…I’m glad they changed that!
I think this has been the 3rd case I’ve read about since I’ve been here. Sicking how people just haven’t got the concept of humanity over here.
But it’s different if a parent pays a school to take care of a kid and they don’t. That sounds like quite a general statement…can you post any proof of how many kids were left in cars? Maybe we can compare…
It’s unfortunate that racism so often comes into play in this kind of discussion. If I recall the previous case, the school actually immediately discovered that the child was missing, and called the child’s home. They only reached some person like the grandma (or relative A) who told them that whoever (relative B) was probably with the child somewhere. In that case the school acted correctly (aside from not checking the bus where the child had fallen asleep), but still could not save the child.
I think the problem is that many of the schoolbus “uncles” or “aunties” are hardly trained to deal with kids and the kind of stuff that can happen to them. My boss called an emergency meeting at school today to discuss this case, and I also talked to her later about it. We thought of various possibilities…e.g. some kind of loud alarm that the child can press from the inside, and you train them to use it (perhaps next to the driver’s seat so the kids don’t constantly press it).
I can’t believe this school claimed that the kid was strangled by a necklace. Pathetic.
My first teaching job came with a bus driver who was an incompetent fool back in 1987…I complained bitterly to the boss who promptly fired him and was stuck with no driver. Hell, it was an extra 12,000NT per month, so for the next 4 years I drove the school bus six days a week.
I don’t think the job has changed much since then…Very low pay, and difficult to fill with a very high turnover rate. I knew every kid I carried well, but it took a couple of months to be able to recognize every one. Most of the drivers aren’t well educated, are unable to find a better job/have nothing else to do.
Get a new driver who doesn’t know the kids and receives no job training? I can see this happening quite easily.
The type of character normally hired can be best personified by the horrific kindy bus fire in Pingjen (near Chungli) back in the early 90’s. A smoking bus driver was carrying a 5 gallon gas can under his seat and it ignited. 22 children burned to death while the driver fled the scene. Their teacher made four forays into the bus to rescue the children before succumbing to the flames herself… :fume: :fume: :fume:
The driver got 2 years in prison… :fume:
Even my 1 and a half year old student can figure out to at least cry when he gets locked up somewhere…where do they park these vans so that nobody can see the kids trying to get out?
My students know of every little move the other makes…could they not tell the teachers that the kids is lying in the van??
Our schoolbus gets parked down in the basement garage. But would a child die if the bus was parked in a garage? Would that be hot enough?
I heard that there were signs of struggling to get out on the child’s arms. Could anybody confirm this?
And how hard is it for a parent to find out if a school is operating with or without a license?
about the details. On the news they show him hooked up to an oxygen mask but he looks blue and bloated! Not at all like the kiddie in the pictures they have of him!
At the risk of sounding racist…(which I will, it doesn’t matter how I say it, you can never win) the co-teachers at my school usually don’t know what is going on. I will always ask where this or that student is, and they will just shrug…give the wrong meds to the wrong kids. Leave the front doors open…not hold their students hands or try to walk on the side where the cars may hit them. Let the kids cut birthday cakes with knives while alone in the room…etc etc etc.
Am I overly paranoid? Or , yet again, is it the lack of crime? Does anyone get what I am saying??? I’m not trying to cause trouble, just discuss this topic. Back home kids get abducted more than here (I know it happens here too) and you always try to know exactly what is happening.
Or is it a lack of interest in the job? I know I am not qualified to be a teacher either, but I guard my students, and the other classes kids with my life. It sometimes seems as if the teachers at my school only worry about their students…not the whole school.
I’m irritated.
I guess it’s more of an unfair generalization. You can’t even always say Taiwanese. Some people think they’re living in the Republic of China. What do you call them? The Republicans of Chinanese?
Anyways, I think some people (ahem) land crappy schools and teachers. My boss is super paranoid. The kids don’t cut the cakes, but when we have cooking class they each get a plastic knife that they can use under teacher supervision only. In Monday’s weekly short meeting she gave us a hand-out stating that we need to make sure the kids don’t walk with toothbrushes in their mouths. Some parents wait in their cars downstairs and no teacher would let them take the elevator three floors down unaccompanied. Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
A good way to introduce safety issues is to say that you are thinking about what’s good for the company. Find some cases where a school has been in trouble or been sued for an injury (e.g. now would be a great time) and say that the school could lose a lot of money if they don’t take care of the kids properly.
Don’t attack, and do a few things at a time.
What are the five most dangerous things you stress about…write them clearly in a list, e.g. Never leave the children alone in a classroom. Find somebody to help out. or Always close the front door.
Stress how much this will benefit the school (stress losing tuition, being sued), and I’m sure you’ll get results.
edit: it would be silly to split off the race comments without splitting off the original generalizations that motivated people to comment…and then, there goes the whole thread, and the people commenting just look like a bunch of idiots trying to define race and culture once again
[quote=“twonavels”]A good way to introduce safety issues is to say that you are thinking about what’s good for the company. Find some cases where a school has been in trouble or been sued for an injury (e.g. now would be a great time) and say that the school could lose a lot of money if they don’t take care of the kids properly.
Don’t attack, and do a few things at a time.
What are the five most dangerous things you stress about…write them clearly in a list,…Stress how much this will benefit the school (stress losing tuition, being sued), and I’m sure you’ll get results.[/quote]
Here is where you are correct in that some teachers land crappy schools: An ex co-worker of mine got fired for trying excctly that approach, while several others received warnings.