NATIONAL COALITION OF SCHOOL BUS SAFETY NEWS 2007

Lawmakers Push For School Bus Seatbelts
March 16, 2007

NORTH CAROLINA -- It's recently become possible to install lap and shoulder belts in school buses. Now some North Carolina lawmakers say it's time to make installing those restraints the law.

As it is now, school buses have extra padding in the seats but no seat belts.

“Now that's the problem I have with school buses,” said state Sen. Eddie Goodall. “When we do have a crash, even though there's padding in the seats, we're going to have those children as projectiles into the other children, and I'm concerned about what that is going to look like.

That's one reason the Republican state senator from the 35th District was quick to sign on to a bill that would require seat belts in school buses. The other was a tragic accident from his past.

“There were three children that were on the bus and died. It was a head-on collision with a truck, and we knew one of the families and I was actually a pallbearer for one of the little girls,” Goodall explained.

It's been a long time since a North Carolina student has been killed in a school bus accident, but Goodall and state Sen. James Forrester, who introduced the bill, say they don't want to wait for something to happen.

“I think we've been lucky. I think people do recognize school buses and the danger and that there are children on there, but that doesn't mean we can't have a situation like happened in Atlanta with six baseball players being killed,” Goodall said.

School buses are designed with high seats to keep the children from being thrown forward or backward, but Goodall says those seats are no help in side impacts and rollovers. It would cost about $10,000 to install seatbelts on a new school bus and retrofitting old buses isn’t possible.

That means cost is sure to be an argument against the seatbelts.

“The cost actually is pretty low when you look at it on a per day basis. It's only 2.80 to put seatbelts in the bus per day,” Goodall said.

Experts with the Department of Public Instruction and the North Carolina Highway Safety Research Center point out that school buses are the safest way to get children to and from school. The most dangerous is being driven by a sibling.

If the law is passed, it would take several years to phase out the old buses. School buses stay in circulation for 200,000 or 20 years, whichever comes first.

By: Jennifer Moxley

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