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NATIONAL COALITION OF SCHOOL BUS SAFETY NEWS 2006Unbuckled Children a
Recipe for Disaster It is time to stop the national madness about seat belts and school buses. Look no further than the horrible accident on Monday near Huntsville, Ala., where a car sideswiped a school bus and sent it plunging nose-first off an I-565 overpass. The bus crashed onto a street 30 feet below the overpass. At last count, four teenagers had died in the crash, the driver was critically injured and 14 children remained hospitalized. Could seat belts have provided a margin of safety for some of these children? We will never know. However, it's clear that the safety system currently in place, in which children on school buses supposedly are protected by ''compartmentalization'' of the seats, wasn't enough to prevent death and injury in this crash. Greater safety In many ways, our country has gone to great lengths to protect adults and children from the wanton effects of traffic accidents. In the span of a generation, we have made seat belts mandatory in all cars, improved the seat belts with shoulder harnesses, required safety seats for children in cars, installed air bags in most vehicles and even improved that system with side-crash air bags. Yet the safety-design technology used in most large school buses is at least 23 years old. Congress and most state legislatures, including the Florida Legislature, have resisted all attempts to make seat belts mandatory in school buses. For years the venerable National Transportation Safety Board has said that strongly reinforced, thickly-padded, high-backed seats that create a safety ''compartment'' for school children is enough to protect them in accidents. It is encouraging, however, that now the agency is rethinking that notion. The Huntsville accident and dozens of similar accidents in recent years prove the fallacy of compartmentalization. Padded and reinforced seats don't provide adequate protection in accidents involving rollovers and side-impact crashes. State of denial So why not require seat belts on all school buses? Bus manufacturers and supporters of the status quo say that school-bus accidents are relatively rare, that most school trips are for short distances and that the expense of retrofitting seat belts in buses would be cost prohibitive. And then there are the lobbyists. Whenever bills are introduced to require Congress or state legislatures to make seat belts mandatory in school buses, opponents have found enough lobbying muscle to defeat the efforts. Perhaps the terrible scene of children being sent to their death in a bus without basic safety restraints will be enough to end America's state of denial about seat belts and school buses. The NTSB says it will soon issue new safety standards for school buses in rollover crashes. Children should be their top priority.
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