The safety and reliability of any vendor working with a school is paramount. The health and lives of children, educators, and staff are at stake. This necessity is amplified when it comes to bus and shuttle transportation providers for field trips, sports trips, and all other sanctioned school functions. That’s where having a SPAB-certified and extensively vetted charter transportation service comes in.
SPAB stands for Student Pupil Activity Bus, and its certificate is legally required in order to transport students to and from school-related events. These include field trips, grad nights, sports, or anything originating on campus. There is an extremely stringent process to award this certificate to a transportation company, and each of its buses and drivers must individually pass regulation as well.
Anyone operating a SPAB bus must have a valid license for the class of vehicle being driven, a passenger endorsement for that license, and a certificate. They must pass a fingerprint and background check, a medical examination, and a CHP SPAB test. In order to even qualify for this listing, each driver must take 15 hours of classroom instruction and 20 hours of behind-the-wheel training. In other words, this is taken very seriously- and it should be.
It is important to know about these requirements and look into all elements of safety when booking a school function. On top of the rigorous SPAB training, you should look into how long a company has served that community, their range of SPAB eligible vehicles, and what their other safety policies are. As we are now in an environment that predicates heightened safety and sanitary standards, it is a good idea to look into those procedures from start to back before booking a motor coach or SPAB bus for charter.
Luckily, SLO Safe Ride has been serving the San Luis Obispo SPAB community for many years at this point, and our standards of service are the industry leader in the area. To begin with, our SPAB certification process has been one of the main focuses of driver training since we began working as one of Cal Poly’s preferred vendors in 2015. Each year since then, we have expanded our fleet, number of SPAB certified drivers, and as a result, school functions that we drive.
While our in-house trainers, mechanics, and detailers had already created a sterling environment for reliability leading up to 2020, our efforts have been magnified since the advent of Covid-19. We take every possible precaution, including masks and partitions for our drivers, infrared thermometers, expanded cleaning parameters, and extensive classroom training for our entire staff. See our entire updated policy suite here.
Booking charter transportation for SPAB trips is often a complicated process. Our goal at SLO Safe Ride is to make it easier on you logistically while providing you every measure of mental peace associated with such an important task. Our experienced logistics and operations team will work with you to make sure that your experience from start-to-finish will be smooth, just like the ride.
If you are interested in booking a SPAB-certified bus for your school outing, please contact us at Info@slosaferide.com, or give us a call at (805) 620-SAFE.
Check out our SPAB-Certified Transportation page!
