A five-year-old was found inside a locked bus in Zarqa last Thursday. He was pronounced dead at hospital.
The Public Security Directorate spokesperson said the Zarqa Governorate Police Directorate received the report that afternoon. The child had been left inside the vehicle for some time after the woman responsible for transporting the students locked it, according to initial investigations. The body was transferred to the forensic department to establish the cause of death. The driver was arrested and investigations are under way ahead of referral to the judiciary.
اضافة اعلان
The bus operated under a direct contract with parents, not with a school. That detail sits at the centre of what follows.
A sector nobody quite owns
Private operators transporting students for a monthly fee agreed with families are a familiar sight outside Jordanian schools, particularly public schools that run no buses of their own.
Educational expert Faisal Tayeh started with who is answerable for what. A family's responsibility begins at the point of choosing the transport, according to Tayeh, and contracting with a private carrier obliges parents to check the vehicle's safety, the driver's qualifications and compliance with the conditions for carrying students. Price and convenience are the wrong basis for that decision.
A public school's direct responsibility runs from the moment a student enters the premises until they leave it, Tayeh explained, which makes it inaccurate to hold a school answerable for a private bus it neither owns, manages nor contracts. He was careful not to let the point become an exit. Student transport remains an educational and societal question that cannot be treated as marginal.
Growing reliance on private carriers requires a clear regulatory framework, in Tayeh's assessment, covering the vehicle, the driver, the number of students, boarding and disembarking procedures and emergency protocols, applied uniformly rather than varying by carrier, region or school.
Roadworthy is not the same as suitable
Passing a vehicle inspection does not make a bus fit to carry children, according to Tayeh. The vehicle needs equipment appropriate to the purpose, and the driver needs to understand that the job extends past driving to keeping children safe on board and dealing with them in a way that accounts for their age.
He pressed hardest on one procedure. A mandatory mechanism to confirm every student has disembarked, counting children on and off and verifying the vehicle is empty before it is parked. That check should not rest on memory or judgement.
Young children fall asleep on the journey, are slow to get off, or cannot articulate what they need, Tayeh noted, and a routine of that kind prevents serious errors. Training should cover everyone involved in student transport, not drivers alone, including what to do when a child is injured or falls ill.
Ayesh Al-Nawaisah, also an educational expert, extended the equipment list to seats, seat belts, alarm systems and adequate ventilation, and flagged small buses carrying large numbers of students without proper regard for safety requirements. Regular and unannounced inspections are what would catch this, in his account.
Oversight after licensing, not just at licensing
Tayeh's argument turns on continuity. Monitoring should not stop at licensing or periodic inspection but extend to on-site checks that operators still comply: student numbers matched to vehicle capacity, drivers following the rules, vehicles used for their licensed purpose.
He also called for a current database of buses and operators working in student transport, holding the essential information on vehicles, drivers and their compliance. Such a register would let regulators see who is operating in the sector, and would give families something firmer than word of mouth when choosing a carrier.
Enforcement completes the picture. Tayeh argued for a graduated response to violations, escalating with severity to suspension of operations or revocation of licence for serious or repeated breaches that put students at risk. A regulatory system is measured by whether it secures compliance, he said, not by whether the rules exist on paper.
Where the responsibility sits
Educational expert Mohammed Abu Amara framed the death as evidence of what happens when the roles fail to connect. Safety comes before the educational process, in his view, whether inside the school or on the way to it, and responsibility runs from the family through the bus company, its driver and attendant, and on to the school.
Abu Amara acknowledged the pressure that shapes many families' decisions. Financial circumstances push some toward cheaper options, which does not remove the obligation to establish that the vehicle carrying their children is safe.
He identified a school-side procedure that matters independently of the bus: monitoring attendance and contacting parents when a student is absent, particularly at the start of the day. Early contact with the family is a critical step in the protection system.
Al-Nawaisah said the Ministry of Education has built transport safety into the school transport project it has begun implementing, as part of the student protection system. Families contribute by teaching children the rules for boarding and getting off, tracking arrival and departure times, confirming safe arrival home, and reporting concerns about a bus or driver, especially where a vehicle is unlicensed.
Al-Nawaisah proposed two structural changes. Public-private partnership to supply licensed and properly equipped buses, with the Ministry covering part of the cost and parents the rest. And digital tools linked to ministry platforms and government applications, giving parents attendance and absence notifications and the ability to track their children's movements.
Wafai Mseis, head of the Jordanian Association for Road Accident Prevention, told Al-Ghad that responsibility for school transport is distributed among families, schools, drivers, vehicles, the Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Department and the Land Transport Regulatory Commission, each carrying a defined part. Safety requires those roles to work together rather than being assigned to any single party, according to Mseis, alongside continuous monitoring of whether buses and drivers are meeting the legislation and standards already in force.
Source: Al-Ghad. Reporting by Alaa Mazhar.
