Photo by Persephone Corvid Rose
A trailer’s broken axle added more drama to the Del Norte High School marching band’s tale of triumph at the Festival of Bands field show in Eugene earlier last month.
But Music Director Dan Sedgwick says the axle is an example of several concerns he and other faculty have raised regarding the safety of vehicles transporting students to and from activities outside of Del Norte County.
Sedgwick, his wife Lisa Sedgwick, who teaches at Mary Peacock Elementary School, and his colleague in the music department at Del Norte High, Collin Kirkwood, described warped brake rotors, leaking brake fluid, a bus that ran out of diesel exhaust fluid and seat belts held together with duct tape.
They brought these concerns to the Del Norte County Unified School District Board of Trustees on Nov. 14, asking what kind of paperwork DNUSD had to track when a complaint was made and what kind of safety check was conducted on a district vehicle following such complaints.
“I want to be able to put my kid in a car and know they’re in a vehicle that’s been checked thoroughly and is safe to be on the road,” Lisa Sedgwick told Redwood Voice Community News on Nov. 18. “I’ve driven vehicles two years ago where the wheel was jerked completely out of my hand and I almost lost control.”
Following comments by Lisa and Dan Sedgwick, Kirkwood, DNHS volleyball coach Debbie Lorenzi and others, the DNUSD Board of Trustees asked district staff to ensure “checks and balances were all in order,” spokesman Michael Hawkins said. But, he said, the Transportation Department is experiencing a shortage in both mechanics and bus drivers.
“When we have shortages of bus drivers or mechanics, it ultimately comes out the same, and that is you just don’t get the most perfectly running machine in every way,” Hawkins told Redwood Voice on Monday. “I think what’s going on is … it’s a situation where something went wrong, but nobody knows exactly what happened. Nobody knows exactly how it went wrong and the school district and our mechanics have been taking a look at trying to determine more closely what that is.”
Hawkins said he wasn’t entirely sure how many mechanic positions were vacant, though the district may have just hired a new staff member.
According to Dan Sedgwick, though the broken axle occurred on a trailer towing the band’s equipment, not a van carrying students, it nearly took out a chaperone’s car that had been following behind.
The axle came flying off the trailer just outside Grants Pass, nearly bringing the band’s trip to the Eugene competition to a halt, Sedgwick said. If it hadn’t been for parents George Wilder and Chris Corpstein, who left Crescent City three hours after the band and brought another trailer, the “Band of Warriors” may have missed their performance before judges at Autzen Stadium.
On Nov. 18, Sedgwick told Redwood Voice that though mechanics said they had checked the trailer before the band’s Oct. 12 competition in Grants Pass, there was no report from that inspection. Sedgwick said he was told prior to the Grants Pass competition that the trailer was good to go.
Sedgwick said he asked Assistant Superintendent of Business Jeff Napier and Transportation Director Chris Armington about that report in a meeting during the week of Nov. 11, after the Eugene competition.
“I wanted the report on the trailer and what they did to service it, and they said they didn’t have one,” Sedgwick told Redwood Voice on Nov. 18.
He said he sent a follow-up email before the Nov. 14 school board meeting and had yet to receive a response.
Another recent incident that had worried both Dan and Lisa Sedgwick concerned a van that ferried choir students to an event in Santa Clara, about eight hours away from Crescent City.
There were nine kids total on that trip, Dan Sedgwick said, including five in the van. According to Lisa Sedgwick, that van was forced to stop at a Les Schwab in Ukiah for more than three hours because the brake rotors were “halfway corroded and completely warped to where they shouldn’t have been driving [them] at all.”
“And the front rotors are the ones they claimed to have replaced earlier this year in April,” Lisa Sedgwick said. “I don’t understand how this keeps going on.”
Lisa Sedgwick said she told trustees that she wanted to help come up with solutions. She said she also suggested they hire an outside auditor to audit the transportation department.
“I said they need to have some sort of maintenance log that the public can see at any time,” she said. “I said if you go to any mechanic or dealership, they’re keeping records on everything they do on their vehicles for liability reasons. If something should cause an accident, they want to prove it wasn’t because of something they did on their side.”
This is Trustee Mike Greer’s thinking. Greer, who represents families in Del Norte County’s District 5, said he asked that the process for keeping track of mechanical repairs on the district’s vehicles be brought before him and his colleagues at the Dec. 12 meeting.
Greer said he has worked in the automotive industry, both as a service coordinator for a dealership and as a manager for a retail auto store. He said he wants to look at how things are being tracked, who is signing off on the vehicle maintenance that has been done and why there has been a lapse in that maintenance.
“We cannot have vehicles available to staff and to transport students that aren’t road worthy,” he told Redwood Voice. “What if the staff is driving a vehicle and something goes wrong, what’s the process on that? Do they pass it on so the mechanics can take a look at it? Who signs off on it, do they test drive [the vehicle] after they inspect it or do they look at it? Because you can’t tell if a brake rotor is warped by looking at it, you’ve got to go out and drive it and do some measurements.”
Greer said an inspection should be conducted any time someone uses a district vehicle and when they bring it back, similar to a rental car.
“The public needs to hear that,” he said. “The public needs that faith that the district is doing what we’re supposed to be doing so if there are any questions, we take a look at the records and [find out] this is what was done, this is who did it, this is what we found, this is what we fixed and so forth — have that transparency and accountability.”
Neither Napier nor DNUSD Superintendent Jeff Harris could be reached for comment.
Meanwhile, Dan Sedgwick said he and Lisa have done some preliminary research into whether there’s a reporting agency above the school district — Dan Sedgwick mentioned OSHA or the California Department of Education — that they can take their concerns to.
Both he and Lisa Sedgwick said they have taken questions from Greer and from DNUSD Board President Charlaine Mazzei, though Mazzei wasn’t at the Nov. 14 meeting.
A further concern Dan Sedgwick mentioned was an encounter he had with one of the mechanics on district property when he said the mechanic had threatened to sue him. That same mechanic, and others, were at the Nov. 14 meeting, though there was nothing on the agenda associated with the transportation department, according to Lisa Sedgwick.
Dan Sedgwick said he sent an email about the incident to the DNUSD HR director, though no official report has been made.
“I’m hoping the district takes this seriously,” Dan Sedgwick said. “They claim they fixed the rotors in April. I want to see evidence that they did that. I want to see that they actually documented our concerns somewhere. And if I had made a threat like that towards another employee, I would expect to be written up.”
