‘Extended Classroom’ to teach road safety to schoolchildren
dubai — To boost road safety and to teach young students how to become responsible drivers once they get behind the wheel, a campaign called ‘The Extended Classroom’ was launched on Wednesday by one of UAE’s biggest school bus operators in partnership with RoadSafetyUAE.
Currently, there is no mandatory road safety content in school curricula and young drivers account for a big share of traffic accidents — for instance, 63 per cent of all accidents in Abu Dhabi, noted Thomas Edelmann, founder and managing director of RoadSafetyUAE.
“There is an alarming rate of young drivers getting involved in accidents and doing improper and dangerous behaviours (like the recent incident of teens doing stunt in the middle of City Walk Dubai),” Edelmann told Khaleej Times. “Therefore, it is import to educate kids as young as possible so they will have the proper behaviour.
“In many countries around the world, road safety is mandatory in their school curricula but the UAE is still working on it. So there is a void and this ‘Extended Classroom’ will somehow fill the vacuum,” Edelmann explained.
“When children are transported by school bus, the bus drivers and the assistants are the experts in road safety and they can engage with kids on a daily basis about proper and safe behaviour. With The Extended Classroom, we have the chance to expose kids to road safety while they are in and around school buses,” he added.
RoadSafetyUAE partnered with School Transport Services (STS), the biggest private school bus operator in the country, to implement the programme.
For Col. Mohanlal Augustine, a retired officer at the Indian Army education corps and currently managing director of STS, road safety is not just vital for his business, it is also personal to him. His company transports around 70,000 students (from two to 19 years old) to and from 70 schools across the country and one of them is his four-year old granddaughter, Caren.
“The reason why we engaged in this campaign is to ensure my granddaughter is safe and so are the 70,000 students,” he said.
“But is not just the children who we want to educate,” Augustine continued. “This campaign has a multiplier effect because the kids they can engage their parents in road safety, like by telling them not to use their mobiles while driving.” The Extended Classroom will teach the children the basics of safety like how to safely wait for and enter the school bus; learn the importance of buckling up themselves or be buckled up in the school bus; the proper behaviour while being driven in school buses and how to safely disembark and approach their waiting parents or guardians, and how to safely cross roads on their way home after their school bus ride.
Augustine also noted that school bus drivers and attendants are persons of authority and that their directions must be obeyed, in the same manner as the guidance of regular teachers is obeyed.
He added that road safety also involves teachers as well as the parents as they must make it crystal clear to students how to behave properly in school buses and that they must follow the rules given to them by schools, school bus operators and school bus personnel.