News
PBS News Hour Provides Nuance of Lap-Shoulder Seat Belt Debate
WRITTEN BY RYAN GRAY |
RYAN@STNONLINE.COM S
chool buses are the safest vehicle on the road for students to get to and from class, no doubt, but crashes happen. So why don’t all school buses have seat belts? Tat was the question PBS News Hour explored last month during a special segment. Correspondent Lisa Stark of partner Education Week, which produced the May 16 piece,
interviewed student transporters, students, government officials and the survivor of the West Brook, Texas crash a decade ago for their opinions. Austin ISD in Texas, as previously reported by School Transportation News, began adopting three-point seat belts five years ago. Stark interviewed Kris Hafezizadeh, the district’s director of transportation. He told her the move costs $8,000 more per bus but that no dollar amount can be placed on safety. “We always ask our kids when they get in cars to put on their seat belts, so to carry the culture inside of our school buses does add additional safety,” adds Hafezizadeh, who presented at the 2016 STN EXPO on Austin ISD’s experiences with the lap-shoulder restraints. Te segment also points out the harsh realities experienced by other districts nationwide that have
resulted in discrepancies on seat belts, despite nearly two dozen state bills introduced this legislative session that call for the three-point restraint systems. Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, for example, has decided not to install the occupant restraints unless required by state law. A bill was introduced in February that would have require just that, but it received an unfavorable committee report a month later and has since stalled in the state’s Senate.
A BETTER USE OF FUNDS? Todd Watkins, the director of transportation, tells Stark that that existing school district budgets can be better utilized for school bus safety in other areas rather than seat belts. It can be a hard case to make, especially to parents, he admits, but adds that not adopting lap-shoulder restraints is the right decision for Montgomery County. “When you’re talking about anything that involving safety, how can you be against it?” he tells Stark.
Te segment produced by Education Week, part of PBS News
Hour’s ongoing weekly feature “Making the Grade,” can be viewed in its entirety at
stnonline.com/go/9q.
“I’m not against it, I just think it is not the best use of money right now because the safety is at such a high level in school buses as is.” Montgomery County estimates that adding school bus lap-shoulder belts would cost the district an additional $1 million a year. Te Education Week report points out that, on average, five student fatalities occur each nationwide each school year in bus crashes despite 25 million students riding the buses to and from school each day. Tat equates to some 10 billion student rides annually across the U.S. However, the death of an 11-year-old boy a day before the broadcast, when his Shelbyville ISD school bus in East Texas rolled over after being rear-ended by a pickup truck, has brought this school year’s on-board fatality figure to eight, according to School Transportation News research. Six student fatalities occurred in the Chattanooga, Tennessee school bus crash on Nov. 21, and a 15-year-old girl was killed in Valdosta, Georgia on Aug. 29 when a semi tractor-trailer collided with her school bus on Interstate 75. (Editor’s note—At this report, an additional 11 students have also died this school year in school bus load- ing and unloading incidents, five of whom were killed by the school bus at the stop or in a crosswalk, and four students killed by motorists illegally passing the school bus. Another student died after falling out of the back of a school bus while it was traveling down a highway.) Stark also interviewed Mark Rosekind, the immediate past administrator of the National Highway Traffic
30 School Transportation News • JUNE 2017 CELEBRATING25YEARS
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