Should students be required to wear seat belts on school buses?

NEA Today, Oct 2004 by Kraemer, James, Hyden, Frank

YES

Over a decade of study has shown me that seat restraints on big school buses are an effective safety device. Professional, medical, and parent associations want them. The industry opposes them because of cost.

Follow the money: The original school bus safety regulations in the 1970s included seat belts. Intense pressure from the bus contractors association and school officials blocked that requirement when the standards were revised in 1977.

The contractors were honest about it. Their February 1976 newsletter said their organization "wishes to say thanks to all of you for your help, letters, telegrams, trips to Washington again and again and again. This effort will save every purchaser of school buses over $300 per bus."

The industry continues to argue that seat belts don't make students safer. But one of many authoritative reports supporting seat belts concluded that even 50 percent lap belt usage could reduce deaths and injuries up to 20 percent. School buses are very safe as they are, but that 20 percent can amount to precious lives saved and life-altering injuries averted every year.

Many drivers are against seat belts because they don't want to be responsible for making kids belt up and stay belted. Also, they're afraid the belts will be used as weapons. I understand that. I'm a veteran driver and have similar concerns.

But my occasional experience with seat belts does not support this fear. When the driver has clear authority to refuse to transport any student who won't buckle up and stay buckled, seat belts can help maintain a calm, safe school bus. Once or twice off the bus and to the office is all it takes to get the unruly child to comply.

Where transportation providers permit defiant children to ride buses, we must expect vandalism and misuse of the belts as weapons. The solution is for districts to back up their drivers and put aides or cameras on buses where they're needed, not to resist seat belts.

JAMES KRAEMER has driven a school bus since 1989 in Oregon. He is an active NEA member and founder of 2safeschools.org, a Web site whose purpose is "to save one child's life."

NO

The modern school bus is by far the safest vehicle on the road. In an average year, there are about seven or eight student fatalities on school buses. That's one hundred times, less than the number of students who die using other ways of getting to school: on foot, riding bicycles, or in cars.

Crash data show that belts on buses would give little, if any, added protection.

All modern buses have a built-in safety system called compartmentalization, mandated by federal motor vehicle safety standards over 20 years ago. It requires seating with strong, well-anchored, closely spaced, high-backed seats, padded both in front and back.

Additional arguments against seat belts are many. Students will use the metal buckles as weapons against other students. Some will even use them to break bus windows.

Lap belts by themselves are dangerous. Installing shoulder belts properly requires reworking the interior of school buses. Many school districts would say this is "much too expensive."

I have yet to hear of a seat belt arrangement that can be adjusted safely and swiftly to fit 60-pound elementary school kids and 200-pound high school football players. Both ride the same buses.

Bus drivers will be expected to enforce seat belt rules. Many students will not want to wear belts. Even if the driver walks the bus to see that every student is buckled up, some students will be unbuckled by the time the driver sits down.

A bus aisle full of loose, dirty seat belts would be a driver's cleaning nightmare.

Some kids think it fun to hook belts across the aisle, a major safety hazard when they get tangled and kids trip over them.

There is a need for seat belts on smaller special education buses. Those are an entirely separate matter because of fewer riders with special needs. But seat belts do not belong on the bigger buses.

FRANK HYDEN has been driving a school bus since 1988, first in Carpentersville and then in Crystal Lake, Illinois, where he helped organize the bus drivers' union.