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NATIONAL COALITION OF SCHOOL BUS SAFETY NEWS 2006Seat Belts Prove Pivotal For
School-Bus Safety Four students who were killed this week when their school bus plunged off an overpass in Huntsville, Ala., might be alive today had they been wearing seat belts. But Alabama, like most states, doesn't require the safety restraints in school vehicles. New Jersey does, as does New York, and their children are safer for it. It is well past the time the rest of the nation caught up. The accident in Alabama, in which at least 30 others were injured, some critically, was not all that uncommon an occurrence. Deadly and damaging school-bus accidents happen with alarming frequency throughout the country. This year alone, a bus carrying 53 students hit two cars stopped at a red light in Liberty, Mo., sending 23 students to the hospital in May. Weeks earlier, two children were killed when their school bus collided head-on with a garbage truck in Arlington, Va., while the list of other school-bus accidents in the past 11 months is far too long to recite.The names of the dead in Monday's crash are Christina Collier, 18, Nicole Ford, 17, Tanesha Hill, 17, and Crystal Renee McCrary, 17, while several others cling to life. Twenty students on average are killed every year in accidents while riding school buses. Even so, school buses remain the safest way to travel to and from school. It's just that school buses could be made a lot safer if they were equipped with seat belts. So, what's the holdup? Although there are roughly 580,000 school buses in operation across the United States, the expense per school district to retrofit them with seat belts or require that new buses come with seat belts isn't all that great, at least when measured against the payoff in terms of lives that would be saved, not to mention everyone's peace of mind. The investment is well worth it.
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