Mom uses Ring camera to bust people not stopping for school bus
Joanna Bentley has been on a two-year mission to keep kids in her Miamisburg, Ohio, neighborhood safe when they board the school bus.
It started when her family moved into their current home. Though the Bentleys have lived in the area for two decades, the problem of cars speeding around stopped school buses had never before been an issue.
"Now we live across the street from the high school," Bentley told "Good Morning America." "You would think people would be more careful in front of a school."
That apparently wasn't the case.
The oldest of her three children is a student at the high school. But it was her then-kindergarten age son she was worried really about -- the one who gets the bus outside her home each day.
"Cars were just blowing through the school bus stop sign," she said. "I realized it was caught by my Ring camera."
She posted the video to a local Facebook page and reached out to the school transportation department and local news.
"I didn't want to just complain," Bentley told "GMA." "I wanted to do something."
So she went to school board and city council meetings. And soon enough, she was heard. State Representative Niraj Antani proposed House Bill 786 in December 2018, which would double the penalty for drivers ignoring school buses. It has not yet become a law, though Bentley is hopeful.
Her action did result in the purchase and instillation of five stop-arm cameras for school buses. These record the license plates of the cars that disregard the bus stop sign, something the Ring camera can't capture.
And those stop-arm cameras are working. Bentley said a local judge wrote to her to let her know more people were coming to his courtroom for violating the traffic law.
"I am really doing something," she told "GMA" she thought when she received the letter.
Bentley has no plans to rest. Just this month her ring camera caught another car racing around a stopped school bus.
"I'm just a mom who wants the kids, all kids, to be safe," she said. "I don't want this law to have be named after a child who gets killed."
