Catherine Rusoff
On any given school day, more than 25 million children ride a school bus, one of the safest vehicles on the road – with one exception: the vast majority of these buses do not have seat belts.
Videos of school bus accidents show children bouncing around like sneakers in the dryer, and it’s not just students who are in danger.
Doug Williamson’s sister, 5th grade teacher Jennifer Williamson-Kennedy, was killed along with a student on a school bus in 2018 when a dump truck crushed the bus while traveling on a New Jersey highway.
Williamson-Kennedy was a Dear teacher who taught in the district throughout his career. There is now a scholarship in his name and people still leave things on his brother’s porch in memory of him years later.
The bus actually had seat belts, but not the much safer three-point seat belts.
“If everyone had seat belts that day, the outcome would have been different,” Williamson said.
The crisis led the state to spend more robust seat belt safety laws.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board have long maintained that seat belts are the safest, and a crash test at IMMI’s Indiana facility, observed by CBS News, shows that. A box truck moving at 40 mph collided with a stopped school bus. Safety dummies wearing three-point seat belts barely moved, while unbelted dummies were sent flying.
Over a 10-year period, 1,110 people died in school bus accidents, an average of 111 people per year. As a result, eight states have laws on the books that require new school buses to have seat belts.
Mark Rosekind, former administrator of the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, recommended seat belts on school buses in 2015, but many in the industry pushed back, often citing the cost — more than $8,500 per bus.
“They use this as an excuse not to act in an area they know could save lives,” Rosekind said.
Drivers are also at risk, as until recently none of the iconic yellow school buses were equipped with driver airbags.
Starting this fall, new buses from bus manufacturer Blue Bird will offer three-point seat belts for all passengers. Next year, they will include airbags for the driver at no additional cost, thanks to IMMI.
“This is an industry first,” said Blue Bird President Britton Smith. “This is the first time that there are three-point lap belts as standard equipment.”
Security advocacy groups and agencies have been demanding these resources for years. Rosekind expects Blue Bird’s changes to spread across the industry and the country.
“This should be a challenge. This should be the standard,” he said.
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