BOARDMAN — Boardman Local School District officials know their bus drivers have a lot to deal with. While much of their job is about good safety habits and keeping schedules, the unexpected can and does occur, and even the most experienced drivers can be taken by surprise if the worst happens.

The school district and the Ohio Department of Public Safety want to make sure they are prepared for life-threatening scenarios.

“The driver’s main role is to safely get the kids to and from school,” said Lisa Bryant, transportation supervisor for the district. “The hardest part of being a bus driver is driving and paying attention to the traffic and what everyone around them is doing as well as maintaining the behavior of the students on the bus. It is very difficult.”

But a bus driver’s job can become instantly more demanding and dangerous, and sometimes drivers are called upon to make split-second life-and-death decisions.

“Today we have the Ohio Safety Council; they do free training for Ohio school bus drivers for active aggressors on school buses,” Bryant said. “So, it’s basically for any time a driver feels threatened, whether it’s a parent outside the bus or a person on the bus, and in this day and age it is unfortunately a necessity for drivers, and the more training they get, the better they’re going to know how to react should there be a situation.”

The training was part of the drivers’ mandatory annual four hours of in-service training, and Bryant said it is the first time they have had this kind of training, both out of necessity and also as a departure from some of the things they always cover.

Ryan Jacobson and Adam Chellis of the Ohio Safety Council gave an hourlong presentation, with a Power Point deck and videos, facilitating a discussion throughout about the situations drivers might encounter and how best to deal with those.

They discussed how bus drivers must be — and usually are — well-versed in situational and environmental awareness. They may even know students better than their teachers. They see the students’ homes and neighborhoods every day. They see students’ moods and demeanors at the beginning and end of the school day.

In terms of school safety and identifying potential problems with a student, Chellis said, drivers may well be the first line of defense.

Among the potential scenarios they explored was a student who poses a threat on the bus. They discussed how to protect the other students, how to get them off the bus, and how to potentially disarm or hinder the offender.

But not every threat scenario involves a student.

The videos covered a wide range of possible situations, either in staged dramatizations or news coverage of incidents that actually happened in the United States.

A person with a gun could be waiting near a school bus stop. In one case, a man chased down a school bus, got in front of it and forced the bus to a stop to confront the driver, and even tried to climb onto the hood of the bus.

They covered the case of Edgar Robles, who was sentenced to 25-30 years in prison after he shot at a school bus and struck two students in Jacksonville, Florida, in May 2015.

Another notorious case they covered was that of Jimmy Lee Dykes. On Jan. 29, 2013, in Dale County, Alabama, Dykes boarded a bus, demanded to take elementary school students hostage, and killed the bus driver, Charles Poland, when he put himself between Dykes and the kids. He took 5-year-old, Ethan Gilman, an autistic child, hostage in a very small bunker on his property and held him there for nearly a week before police were able to breach the space and save the boy. Dykes was killed in the siege.

The conversation included discussions of what drivers have at their disposal to use as a weapon in self-defense, when it is appropriate to drive past a bus stop if they believe there is a potentially dangerous situation, how to notify the school district if something happens on the bus, and other safety and emergency response matters.

Once the conversation in the meeting room was over, they went outside to a bus in the parking lot. There they were met by Sgt. Michael Hughes of the Boardman Police Department, the department’s chief tactical officer and a member of the Mahoning County SWAT Team. Local media were asked not to report the details of what Hughes shared with the drivers, because he explained to them, step-by-step, what police would do in the event of a hostage situation on a bus.