AMMAN — On the first day of the academic year 2017/2018, the Traffic Department in coordination with the Public Security Department on Tuesday launched the annual "Back to School" campaign around the Kingdom.

 

The campaign aims at ensuring a safe and secure traffic and transportation of students, teachers and parents, through dispatching traffic personnel on roads, with a special focus on roads with critical safety situations, Col. Basem Kharabsheh, Amman’s Traffic Department director, told The Jordan Times. 

 

Heavy inspection campaigns on private school buses are taking place to check on the status of the licences of both the vehicles and the drivers, he added. 

 

“From our previous experience, we used to find buses that are not licensed, that overloaded the buses with students and that had technical issues," Kharabsheh noted, adding "we also check on drivers because, last year, we found unlicensed drivers including foreigners and individuals with criminal records working as school bus drivers”.  

 

The campaign is also targeting illegal vans that transfer students to public schools, which are originally designed for the transportation of goods. 

 

“These vans transport students in an inhuman way, where over 15 students are crammed [in the narrow space],” the colonel added. 

 

Teachers syndicate’s vice president, Ibrahim Shabaneh, said that the syndicate always warns of the danger of these vans, pointing out the large number of students loaded into the vans and urged the government to find a solution to this issue. 

 

“Some students live two to three kilometres away from school and take these unsafe vans to go to school, because they are unfamiliar with local transportation,” Shabaneh said. 

 

An accident of a van transporting so many children might turn into a disaster, he concluded. 

 

Around 1.95 million students, 193,000 of whom are first graders, started school on Tuesday across the Kingdom.

 

More than 105,000 teachers and administrative staff started working on August 26, according to Education Ministry Spokesperson Walid Jallad, who stressed that the ministry was still appointing new teachers at schools to fill vacancies after finishing internal  — within the same district — and external — to other educational districts —  transfers of teachers.

 

The central traffic department campaign is combined with the Jordan Road Institute's plan to spread awareness on road safety through media campaigns and lectures provided to the drivers and students, Kharabsheh said.