Chattanooga’s pain

By now, all of us have been moved by the dead and injured children in Chattanooga from a school bus crash. The driver, Johnthony K. Walker, was charged with vehicular homicide for recklessly driving elementary school children home in the afternoon, along winding and dangerous roads. Evidently, Mr. Walker ran his bus off the road and crashed into a utility pole, embankment, mailbox and a tree. The pictures of the crumpled bus are horrible.

Mr. Walker had only obtained a commercial driver’s license in April of this year. By September, he had already been involved in a “fender-bender” driving his school bus. This time, he was driving too fast for such a winding mountain road, which led law enforcement investigating the crash to determine he was “reckless” and so charge him with vehicular homicide. Drug and alcohol tests are pending. Obviously, if they come back positive, it is a whole different issue. Otherwise, it remains to be seen if the charges will “stick.”

The parents and their community must be devastated. Anytime disaster befalls such young children, grief overflows. Nothing can bring back lost angels or truly heal the physical and psychic wounds of the survivors. Woodmore Elementary School and the Hamilton County school system will never be the same.

Buried in stories that I had read about on this tragedy was a note that Mr. Walker’s employer was a private company called “Durham School Services (DSS),” which is really the point of this article.

With the “Reagan Revolution” came a political philosophy that public employees were bad for society. For those of you old enough to remember, President Reagan “broke” the Air Traffic Controllers Union and forced them to settle for compensation dictated by the government. He also assured in an idea that “privatization” was good for society.

The heritage of this Reagan era concept still lives with us today. It is why so much of the support teams for our military units are compromised of private contractors, instead of service members or their civilian government counterparts.

It is also why, frankly, it is so hard to rebuild major infrastructure. Instead of governments at all levels seeing this as a fundamental responsibility of government, as both Roosevelts, Truman and Eisenhower believed, privatization is often used as a panacea to avoid government “on the books” spending.

Governments can raise funds through bonds and/or tax credits, guaranteeing returns for investors to build, in exchange for a “stake” in the project, for example, toll roads, some of our airport projects and sports stadiums.

Another form of this privatization “craze” is in criminal justice, where private probation companies make money off of fees and a percentage of fine collection, private prisons tout the ability to build and stock prisons more efficiently and safer and nursing companies provide basic medical care for detainees and/or prisons. Profit, profit, profit, is the underlying ethos, as opposed to competency and safety.

For governments, privatization seems like a win/win. You can contract for expenses on a year-to-year basis without worrying about overruns and the headaches of personnel management and you also have the attendant benefit of being able to “off-load” legal responsibility on the contract entity should anything go wrong.

School bus transportation departments are generally the purview of local school systems, just like maintenance departments. Government employees doing relatively menial, but oh so important, tasks designed to keep our children safe and clean.

Evidently, Hamilton County must have bought into the hollow idea that paying a company to bus its children was better than a school-run system with accountability from the school board.

Those grieving parents in Chattanooga, when they ask questions, will be diverted by their elected officials to DDS. When they want to know why someone with so little experience was hired to shuttle their precious cargo back and forth to school, school officials won’t be providing answers.

What we know about when profit enters into equations is that a certain level of aberrant results is assumed as part of the risk of commercial activity. This is the lesson of why McDonald’s was successfully sued so many years ago for knowingly serving scalding coffee. It may be more profitable to pay low wages to a marginally trained and skilled bus drivers, even if tragedy ensues, than carefully train and screen for the best. In other words, Chattanooga’s grieving parents are not likely to find any accountability. DSS’ insurance company will pay for Walker’s negligence, even criminality, and keep cashing those contract profits every month.

Warner Robins attorney Jim Rockefeller is the former chief assistant district attorney for Houston County and a former assistant state attorney in Miami. Owner of Rockefeller Law Center, he has been in private practice since 2000. Email your comments or confidential legal questions to jim@rockefellerlawcenter.com.

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