COMMENTARY Zero. Tat’s my goal for student fatalities on and around school buses. I was thinking about this
in October as I prepared to step on stage at the NAPT Summit conference in Cincinnati. Tere, the association was about to induct me into the NAPT Hall of Fame. Several other pupil transporters were receiving recognition that night, too. Given that this would probably be my last opportunity to speak before the assembled student
Can We Get To Zero?
By Bill Paul
transportation industry, I concluded my remarks by issuing a challenge. You see, I believe our society’s direction is set by conversation. My conversation that night was as simple and direct as a writing teacher taught me long ago “Zero,” I said. “Your goal should be zero school bus fatalities in the loading/unloading zone.” As I write this editorial, STN received an advance copy of the findings of the annual Kansas State
Department of Education (KSDE) National School Bus Loading and Unloading Zone Survey. Te 2010-2011 survey reports eight fatalities in seven states! While the total deaths decreased from 13, unfortunately the number of states reporting a fatality is up from five the previous year. It would be easy to be complacent about these data. Only eight, that’s great — but is it really? If
you are Mom or Dad, the loss of Johnny or Mary is 100 percent. Te safety record of the industry is irrelevant to the family, as the American School Bus Council learned over the summer during parental focus groups. Here are a couple of other numbers to factor in. Tere were an estimated 500,000 yellow school
buses on the road in 2011, up from 300,000 when I started in the industry in 1982. Te possibilities for crashes are astronomical. Tink about this: each school year kids clamber aboard the school bus 10 billion times and then get off the bus 10 billion times. Tat equals 20 billion opportunities for an accident in the loading/unloading zone. Ten, too, there are school bus-related fatalities that are unreported in the national survey. As
reported in the January 2009 edition of STN, our editors conduct daily Google searches of 4,500 national and regional newspapers in search of school transportation related-developments. Sadly, we find credible reports of school bus fatalities that do not show up in the national survey. From January through October 2011, we found 22 fatalities that appear to be legitimate. How many of these will be reported in the National School Bus Loading and Unloading Zone Survey a year from now remains to be seen. In case readers wonder why the disconnect, there are many reasons. Among them is varying criteria
of what constitutes a school bus fatality. In the mid-1980s, an effort was undertaken to create a Uniform Accident Report. As I recall, a handful of states complied, but the effort grounded to a halt when state police agencies declined to revise their accident reporting forms for the relatively small number of school bus fatalities compared to the nearly 40,000 annual highway fatalities of all kinds. Still, perhaps the industry itself could better define school bus fatalities, say, by distinguishing
loading/unloading zone accidents from accidents that occur as children walk to or from a school bus stop. Send your comments to Editor Ryan Gray at
ryan@stnonline.com. In the meantime, I direct readers to an analysis by STN’s Associate Editor Sylvia Arroyo on page 22 that examines conflicting criteria and other factors that cause some school bus fatalities to go unreported. Upon returning home from Cincinnati, I glanced through some old issues of School Bus Fleet, where
I served as the editor and publisher for nine years before launching School Transportation News. I found my January 1983 editorial, in which I issued the same challenge. “Zero,” I wrote nearly 30 years ago. “Tat’s the goal. Zero. Zero what, you ask? Zero school bus fatalities. In 1983. In 1984. In 1985. Forever.” Safety is not easy. It requires a full-court press all the time. Sadly, in the intervening three decades,
we haven’t achieved the goal of zero school bus fatalities. Still, zero remains the goal. It is a conversa- tion we need to have. ■
Bill Paul launched STN in September 1991. He is currently Editor Emeritus and is CEO of STN Media.
58 School Transportation News Magazine January 2012
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