8/1/2023 0 Comments School bus driver seat beltsRetrofitting buses already on the road would cost even more. They point to the good safety records, question whether children can quickly unbuckle and evacuate buses in some emergencies, and balk at the estimated $7,000 to $10,000 cost of adding seat belts to a new school bus already priced at $80,000 to $120,000. Fred Camillo, a Republican who is sponsoring a bill that would require seat belts on new buses from model year 2022 on. “Kids have to be on these buses, and I think we have to do everything we can to protect them,” said Connecticut state Rep. Nationwide, only six school-age passengers die in bus crashes each year, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).įor seat belt advocates, there’s little question what states should do. And if history is any indication, many of them will fail amid questions about the seat belts’ effectiveness in preventing death and injury, and whether they are worth the cost to financially strapped school districts. So far, none of the bills - many of which would require that new school buses purchased after a certain date be equipped with seat belts - have been passed. That’s far more states than usual - a change some safety experts attribute to a federal recommendation in late 2015 that school buses have seat belts. So far, they haven’t.īut they’re considering a seat belt bill again this year, and similar legislation has been introduced in at least 19 other states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL). Since then, Prescott, a middle school teacher, has been urging Nebraska lawmakers to require what she says are lifesaving seat belts on new school buses. Seat belts weren’t required on school buses, and the bus didn’t have any for passengers. So was the driver, the only one on the bus who was wearing a seat belt. But when I finally did, I found he was unconscious.”īenjamin, along with two other students and a parent, died as a result of the crash. All I could think of was that I had to get to my son. “Kids were screaming and hurt and in tangled heaps that I stepped over. “I remember that I grabbed the luggage rack and was hanging from it,” Prescott, 55, recalled. Her son Benjamin, 14, was sitting a few rows up, behind the driver. She was a chaperone for the high school band, which was returning from a competition in October 2001. Tennessee is one of at least 20 states in which legislators have introduced bills requiring seat belts on school buses this year.ĭawn Prescott doesn’t recall all the details of when the school bus she was riding on more than 15 years ago careened off a bridge in Omaha, Nebraska, plunged nearly 50 feet into a creek bed, and landed on its side. Six elementary school students died and 31 were injured. A school bus is carried away from a crash site in November in Chattanooga, Tennessee.
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