Get cameras on Nassau school buses

Children across Long Island will begin to board school buses this week. They will count on the bus drivers, and all the other drivers around them, for their safety. But one critical tool will be missing from too many of Nassau County’s buses — cameras that catch drivers who illegally pass a yellow bus with its stop-arm extended.

Because the cameras were introduced in a fragmented, inconsistent way, and with a lack of strong countywide leadership, less than half of Nassau’s buses will have those devices activated when schools open over the next week.

This program began with a bidding process when Laura Curran was county executive, but suffered some bumps along the way in the vendor selection process. After Bruce Blakeman became county executive last year, he stepped away from spearheading the stop-arm camera program, leaving towns and cities responsible to get it running. Once that is done, only then can school districts opt in and turn the cameras on.

It’s unfortunate and puzzling that Blakeman, who rightly trumpets public safety as a top priority, would in this case choose a hands-off approach, especially when there’s a nearby example to follow. Suffolk isn’t always a model of efficiency, speed or operational prowess, but that county got its school bus camera program underway in 2017 — the first in the state to do so. Within a year, more than 118,000 tickets were issued.

In a statement, Blakeman spokesman Christopher Boyle said the program had “pluses and minuses.” What are the minuses of cameras that catch drivers in the act of behaving illegally and unsafely? Boyle didn’t respond to the editorial board’s inquiries. If the concern is that the cameras have caught some drivers erroneously, then tweaks should be made as the program gets started. It’s not a reason to avoid it altogether.

Now the remaining towns and cities must get the cameras working. Hempstead Town and Long Beach have begun, and Glen Cove just awaits school district approval. For Oyster Bay and North Hempstead, the ride has been slower. Officials from both towns say they hope to have cameras working by January, and that agreements and memorandums of understanding still need to be finalized and passed. But every day that goes by without the bus cameras is a day our children climb aboard buses lacking a key safety feature. The more quickly the towns do what the county did not, the better. And in Hempstead and Glen Cove, school districts that have not opted in should do so promptly. Their children’s well-being depends on it.