Small Buses Must Have Safer Belts, U.S. Rule Says

This from Ed Week:

Mandate Also Calls for Higher Seat Backs on Larger School Buses

Smaller school buses will have to be equipped with three-point, lap-and-shoulder seat belts for the first time, and larger buses will have higher seat backs, under a federal rule announced last week.

The seat belts will only have to be installed in new buses weighing 5 tons or less, and the requirement will not take effect until 2011. These smaller school buses are already required to have lap belts, but not the safer, harness-style belts. There is no seat belt requirement for larger buses...

A frightened girl asked the driver to slow down ...But he didn't

This from The Washingtron Post

Raw Video: School Bus Crashes in Maryland

School Bus Overturns in

Prince George's County Maryland

44 Students Hospitalized

With Minor Injuries;

Driver Is Accused of Speeding

School bus 1156 was going too fast. That much was clear to the 44 students heading to William Wirt Middle School in the Riverdale area just before 9 a.m. yesterday.

A frightened girl asked the driver to slow down, four passengers recalled. But he didn't, the four said. And the students received an unpleasant lesson in physics: The top-heavy bus, whipping into a left turn from Riverdale Road onto 61st Place, tipped over onto its side, grinding to a halt and throwing screaming children into a heap.

The students and the driver were sent to hospitals with injuries that were not life-threatening, police and school officials said. Antonio Nate Robinson, 46, was charged with speeding, negligent driving and not wearing a seat belt, said Officer Henry Tippett, a spokesman for the Prince George's County police. The violations could result in a total fine of $435 and six points on his driver's license.

Robinson, of Hyattsville, had five traffic violations in Maryland from 1985 to 1992, according to court records. The violations included failing to obey a stop sign and driving the wrong way down a one-way street. In Virginia in 1998, he was ticketed for going 70 to 74 mph in a 55 mph zone.
The Maryland violations were considered minor and old enough not to prevent him from being hired as a bus driver by the Prince George's County school system in August 2006.

Robinson's record "certainly came up during his screening," said John White, a spokesman for the school system. "There were no traffic accidents, so to speak. . . . He had 14 years between '92 and 2006. We thought that was a significant time with a clean driving record, and we thought with training he could be a responsible driver." ...

Reactions mixed on requiring school bus seat belts

This from the Arizona Republic:

Southeast Valley [Arizona] public school officials have differing reactions to the new school bus requirements: All new mini-buses, those weighing 10,000 pounds or less, must be equipped with lap-and-shoulder belts and all buses will have seat backs raised from 20 inches to 24 inches.

Research from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, part of the U.S. Department of Transportation, indicates raising seat backs to 24 inches would "likely reduce the potential for passenger override in a crash," reads the agency's proposal, referring to the possibility of students being thrown into another seat.

The agency acknowledges that lap-and-shoulder belts could enhance the safety of large school buses, but says that "realistically . . . we recognize that funds provided for pupil transportation are limited." ...

Should School Buses Have Seatbelts?

Money and Enforcement Issues Add to the Safety Question

Ever wonder if the present compartmentalization system is safe enough for school children on school buses? No seat belts. No side protection. Children in padded seats spaced close together, like eggs in a carton.

When a former Grant County bus driver was sentenced to 22 years in prison for a near fatal wreck (while she was under the influence of drugs) many Kentuckians saw the video taken by the bus camera. Students were shaken violently and several were seriously injured.

Aside from safe vehicle and a sober driver can the busses that carry school children be made safer?

Some have suggested seat belts for all children but there is reason to believe that might even produce more - and more serious - injury to children. Texas recently required seat belts and shoulder restraints on their schoo busses.

Check out the crash test video and compare for yourself the present compartmentalization system, seat belts and seat belts with shoulder restraint.

This from Edmunds.

Should children use seatbelts on school buses? Think this is a no-brainer? Not so fast. Some experts say yes, others say no, and the government's highway safety agency hasn't been able to make a decision.The government agency involved, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA), invited all points of view to be heard at a roundtable in July 2007.

Here's what we found out:
Safest Form of Transportation
First, school buses, the big yellow variety, are incredibly safe.
According to NHTSA, of the 23.5 million school children who travel an estimated 4.3 billion miles on 450,000 yellow school buses each year, on average, six die in crashes. At the summit, Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters asked, "How can we make this number lower still, so that no parent ever has to hear...that the cherished child they sent off in the bus...is never coming home...even if it requires opening up old decisions and challenging old assumptions?

"In 2002, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) found an additional 815 fatalities related to school transportation per year. But here's the difference: 75 percent of those school children were traveling in passenger cars, not school buses, and just over half of those were teenagers driving themselves to school. Another 22 percent of the 815 fatalities occurred during walking and bicycling.

Only 2 percent were school bus-related — referring to children who were hit by buses.

Robin Leeds, spokesperson for the National School Transportation Association, which represents private school bus contractors, says, "The focus on seatbelts ignores the fact that we lose 800 children going to and from school in some other mode. Our challenge is not to make kids in school buses safer. Our challenge is to make kids safer, and the way to do that is to put them in school buses."

Can Buses Be Made Safer Still?

Fatalities aren't the only measure of safety. A NHTSA crashworthiness study of large school buses found that properly used lap/shoulder belts would mean fewer head injuries compared to unbelted passengers. (Lap belts alone, though, showed some potential to cause head and spinal injuries to young children.)

In 1977, federal regulation mandated that large school buses must have strong, closely spaced seats with energy-absorbing seatbacks, a built-in protection called "compartmentalization" that is based on the way crash forces are distributed. The buses were exempted from carrying lap belts. But the government required that small buses (with a gross vehicle weight rating of 10,000 pounds or less) carry lap belts, because the design and weight of the smaller vehicles would not offer protection similar to large ones.

Despite these measures, government accident studies from the 1980s say that passengers are still endangered in large school buses when they crash with an even bigger or heavier vehicle, such as a loaded tractor-trailer truck, or if they roll over an embankment....

Officials stressing student safety on buses

Soon the annual flood of yellow school buses will pour onto local roads as thousands of children begin their daily transport to and from school.

Last school year brought headlines about a handful of dangerous school bus incidents in Kentucky and Ohio that area school officials say have prompted them to stress student safety this school year.

"Our bus drivers steer a 38-foot-long, $70,000 vehicle loaded with the most precious cargo on earth - our children," says Tracey Carson, spokeswoman for Mason schools in Warren County (OH).

"The first and last people our students see to and from school is their school bus driver. These drivers are an integral part of our formula for successful schools," Carson added. "Our drivers' desire for safety is paramount, and they spend countless hours training and maintaining our fleet. We're very fortunate to have the drivers we do."

But as more than 1.6 million students in Ohio and Kentucky climb aboard for the start of the school year, education officials advise parents to make their children aware of some simple rules and practices to make sure their ride is safe and pleasant.

Eighty percent of Ohio students ride school buses each school day, and nearly 17,000 bus drivers, mechanics, secretaries and supervisors are dedicated to providing safe transportation for your children, according to J.C. Benton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education.

Benton says national studies show school buses are the safest method for transporting young people - 30 times safer than passenger cars. And recent reports by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Academy of Sciences have reconfirmed that statistic.

"However, accidents can happen. Most student accidents involving school buses occur in the 'danger zone,' a 10-foot perimeter around the bus, especially near the front and the right rear tire," Benton says.

Lisa Gross, spokeswoman for the Kentucky Department of Education, says more than half of the state's 650,000 students ride about 9,800 buses each school day.

"School buses are some of the safest modes of transportation," Gross said. "With the intensive training and monitoring by this agency and local school districts, school bus drivers are experts in maneuvering their large vehicles in urban traffic, suburban streets and country roads. School transportation is a key to learning - if you're not at school, you aren't being taught." ...

This from the Cincinnati Enquirer.

Texas school buses getting seat belts

Texas just decided that school kids should be strapped into buses equipped with lap and shoulder belts.

California, Florida, Louisiana, New York and New Jersey require seat belts on new school buses, too.

Yet most school districts across the country don't require seat belts on school buses -- largely because of cost and low fatality rates that say the big yellow bus already is safe.

But sentiment may be changing.

New federal guidelines due this fall are expected to propose voluntary standards for the use of belts. That's a shift in long-standing policy.

Researchers at Columbus Children's Hospital in Ohio last year found 17,000 school bus-related injuries in the U.S. every year, a rate up to three times more than expected.

''People don't have a clue to the amount of force that's transferred by a side impact or rollover to the bodies of these school children,'' said expert Gary A. Smith.

Rare crash video from inside a Grant County, Ky., bus shows little kids being flung to one side then the other, as drug-impaired driver Angelynna Young swerves.

No one was killed in the crash. But all 17 kids were sent to hospitals, including Cody Shively, 12, who suffered serious head injuries. A section of his skull is still stored in a freezer awaiting surgical reattachment.

This from the Chicago Sun-Times.

More than 10,000 Children Involved in School Bus Crashes Annually in Ohio

New findings underscore importance of lap-shoulder belts on school buses

COLUMBUS, OH, July 09, 2007 — Each year in the United States, 25.5 million children travel an estimated 4.3 billion miles on school buses. New research findings by investigators in the Center for Injury Research and Policy (CIRP) at Columbus Children’s Hospital emphasize the large number of children involved in school bus crashes each year.

According to the new study, there were approximately 20,800 children younger than age 18 years, who were occupants on a school bus involved in a crash in Ohio during the two-year period, 2003-04. “This high frequency of children involved in school bus crashes – more than 10,000 per year in Ohio alone – reinforces the need to provide the best occupant crash protection possible to children on school buses, which is a lap-shoulder belt for most school age children,” said Gary Smith, MD, DrPH, director of CIRP at Children’s Hospital and a faculty member of Ohio State University College of Medicine.

In November 2006, this research group was also the first to use a national sample to describe nonfatal school bus-related injuries to children and teenagers treated in hospital emergency departments across the country. Following the release of that study and a number of tragic school bus-related crashes earlier this year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) held a public meeting on July 11, 2007, to discuss the issue of seat belts on large school buses.

The previous study from CIRP, published in the November 2006 issue of Pediatrics, found that from 2001 through 2003 there were an estimated 51,100 school bus-related injuries nationally that resulted in treatment in U.S. emergency departments. That equals approximately 17,000 injuries annually. In addition, that study showed that traffic-related crashes are the leading mechanism of nonfatal school bus-related injury to children in the U.S., accounting for 42 percent of injuries. Current federal regulations use a strategy known as “compartmentalization” as the main method for protecting children in crashes on large school buses.

Compartmentalization uses tall padded seat backs on closely spaced seats to provide protection in a crash. However, in the new study examining school bus crashes in Ohio, 23 percent of the children were involved in a side-impact or rollover crash, when compartmentalization offers no protection to child passengers. Compartmentalization also fails to prevent injury from sudden swerves and when children are out of their normal seated position. Lap-shoulder belts keep children in their seats and offer protection during swerves and crashes of all types. In addition, lap-shoulder belts can improve student behavior by keeping children in their seats, which results in less driver distraction and thereby lessens the chance of a crash.“

Compartmentalization may have been the best that could be offered 30 years ago, but this concept is no longer state-of-the-art,” said Dr. Smith...

This from Center for Injury Research and Policy (CIRP) at Columbus Children’s Hospital press release.