Woman recalls kidnapping- Emily Miller

http://www.cnn.com/2015/11/19/us/rewind-chowchilla-school-bus-kidnapping/index.html

A woman named Lynda recalls the time her 4th grade class was kidnapped. This happened almost 40 years ago and the experience still haunts them.

Lynda and her 25 classmates were on a bus ride back from a field trip. The driver, Edward Ray, approached a van in the middle of a rural road that seemed to need help. Edward offered to help them out of generosity when 3 men stormed into the bus with guns, ordering everyone to the back of the bus.
The men took control of the wheel and drove 11 hours into the middle of nowhere. They made the students and bus driver go down a ladder, into a buried van. The kidnappers then removed the ladder and stood nearby. Their plan was to demand a $5,000,000 ransom for the kids. The group waited helplessly underground for either rescue or death. The dark, crowded space was stocked carelessly with sparse meals and water. After 16 hours, bus driver Edward Ray devised a plan. When the kidnappers were asleep, the kids stacked mattresses to make a ladder. They were able to silently escape and find a building which was nearby. They were met with desperate rescuers who knew exactly who the children were.
Still, 4 decades later, the victims suffer from the traumatic experience. Anxiety, claustrophobia, fear of the dark, and nightmares won't leave them alone, even though the kidnappers were sent to prison for life.

This article made me wonder how much education has reformed since the early 1800s. Over time, it has become more thorough, accessible, open to everyone, and safer. The field trip kidnapping happened only 40 years ago, and today we have to go through a lengthy process of getting signatures just so we can take a field trip across the street. The process has been irritating in the past, but now I realize that any measure to ensure the safety of students is worth the complication. (For the sake of this argument, I'm disregarding our infamous ID badges here)