School District Seeks to Protect Buses From Vandalism With New Electric Fences

Portland Public Schools’ minibuses, besieged by vandalism, will soon be protected by electric fences, assuming the School Board gives the proposal a thumbs-up at a meeting next week.

Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero has already approved the $205,000 contract to lease the “intense but nonlethal 7,000-volt” fences built by Amarok, which will be deployed around the district’s two North Portland bus yards.

The lots house the minibuses used to transport special needs students. The district’s larger buses are operated by private contractors who have already installed the same fences along their lots long ago.

The contract comes in the wake of protests by the district’s bus drivers at a board meeting last year, covered by WW in November. Vandals were cutting through the flimsy fences around the lots to vandalize buses and steal gas. The drivers showed up in union shirts waving “Stop the Ransacking” signs, and told the board that a lack of security at the lots was jeopardizing their safety.

The district has since implemented additional security measures, one of those drivers, Bob Foster, tells WW. A new security company is patrolling more aggressively at night, and some district drivers have been assigned to keep watch over the lots during the day.

Catalytic converter theft has declined, Foster says. (WW covered the crackdown late last year of a multistate theft ring that was transporting thousands of Portland-area catalytic converters to recyclers in New Jersey.) But ransackings are up, he says, and now drivers’ private vehicles, parked in the same lots during the day while they’re on routes, are being hit too.

Foster plans to testify before the board at its meeting Jan. 24, when it will vote on the contract. He says he’ll update the board on the latest safety issues and “encourage them to vote yes.”