LANSING, Mich. (Michigan News Source) – The Michigan State Police (MSP) and Michigan Department of Education (MDE) have failed to enforce safety standards for school buses, according to a state audit report released in April 2025.

Qualifications, inspections, and licenses.

The Office of the Auditor General reviewed select school buses and school drivers statewide between 2019 and 2023, and found that many school bus drivers lack the qualifications to drive a bus and many school buses were not inspected often enough. The report found fault with both MDE, which is responsible for enforcing school bus driver training and laws, and the MSP, which is responsible for conducting annual inspections on school buses.

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According to the report, 69% of 242 surveyed bus drivers could not provide documentation demonstrating their qualifications, and 6% of all 1,936 active bus drivers in the state did not have a license to operate a bus. Additionally, the records of 217 sampled bus drivers indicated that 35% completed bus training anywhere from 31 to 679 days late.

The report attributes these issues to a failure on MDE’s part to rigorously review bus driver training facilities, stating that the MDE did not review 11 of the state’s 17 facilities within a three-year period.

Safety violations.

The buses themselves are also at an increased risk of failure, as the report found 41.4% of buses during the school years of 2021-2023 went 366 days or more without an inspection, sometimes as many as 730 days. The report pointed out that the number of severe safety violations in the buses increased with the number of days without an inspection.

This is a result of unclear wording in the law for bus inspections, the report says. The MSP is required to inspect buses annually, but the department’s inspection cycle, which ranges from Sept. 1 to Aug. 31 of the next year, allows them to inspect a bus once on Sept. 1 2024 and then not again until August 31, 2026, a 730-day gap. The auditor recommended that MSP change their regulation language to require inspections every 365 days rather than annually.

Other report findings.

The auditor also found:
• 10 bus drivers were driving with violations requiring them to retake a commercial driver’s license test, but school districts could not demonstrate that eight out of 10 drivers did so.
• 15 bus drivers were driving with unreported felony convictions.
• More than 80% of pre-trip bus inspections lacked proper documentation.
• Red warning stickers for unsafe buses excluded language required by law.

The MDE and MSP largely agreed with the report and proposed plans to fix the issues in June 2025.