Miyoshi Price
•8/19/2026
LEE COUNTY, Fla. (WINK)— In the first week of school, the Lee County Sheriff's Office cited 686 drivers for illegally passing stopped school buses.
That's an average of more than 130 citations for each of the first five school days. The sheriff's office reviewed 737 citations total.
Parents at bus stops say it's hard to understand how it's happening so often. When a school bus stop arm comes out, there are multiple warnings including yellow lights, red flashing lights and the stop sign itself.
Bus-mounted cameras record vehicles that keep going, including their license plates. On a two-way or multi-lane road, traffic in both directions has to stop.
The exception is when opposing lanes are separated by a raised barrier or an unpaved median at least five feet wide. The revenue from those citations is coming back to the school district and will help change how students get to school.
"We are taking the revenue that's been raised by those citations and investing in brand new software that should be implemented coming into the fall and fully online in the first semester, and that is going to just revolutionize for us our routing and our optimization capabilities," said Rob Spicker, Lee County Schools spokesman.
"We are at a position where our software that we use to do routing is so old, we might as well do it on paper," Spicker said.
Spicker said the new software should arrive in November. The goal is to build more efficient bus routes and ultimately get more students to school on time.
