11/4/2013 4:54:00 PM School Bus Safety Zach Valentine 11/3/13

This essay is targeted at the families around the United States who send their children to and from school on public school busses five days a week. Most parents already agree with the need for seatbelt installation in their childrens public transportation, but will have received more facts and statistical information by the end of this paper. The second audience this essay is targeted towards is adults without children, who probably have never thought twice about school bus safety, because they do not send their loved ones to school on these busses on a daily basis. The goal of this essay is to persuade people who are against the addition of seatbelts into our school busses, or simply the people who do not know about the need for these safety precautions, to fight for school bus safety in the United States, beginning with safety belt installation.

School busses around the United States are not always equipped with safety belts for their passengers, even though it is a necessity for the bus driver to wear a seatbelt to abide by state laws. I believe it should be a mandatory requirement for all children riding school busses to wear a seatbelt to protect them from dangers on the road. Children are the future of our country as a whole and we should feel obligated to make sure they are being safely transported on a daily basis, especially when it is something as serious as the transportation to where they receive their education. Parents should feel safe sending their young loved ones off to school everyday, and should feel the reassurance that they will be delivered back to them at the end of the day safe from injuries; the easiest way to give the parents around the United States reassurance is the simple addition of seatbelts to our schools busses around the country. Injuries and fatalities continue to happen to young children in school bus accidents, and I believe it is time for us to do something to prevent these catastrophes from continuing to happen. Wearing a seatbelt can save your life, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), more than 15,000 lives are saved each year in the United States (Orenstein).

Seatbelts protect human beings in violent crashes by a system which experts call 5-way protection. The first way a seatbelt protects you is it keeps you inside of the vehicle, being thrown from a moving vehicle decreases your chances of surviving by four times. Secondly, a seatbelt straps around your hips and shoulders, which are the strongest parts of a human body, keeping your body fully restrained. Also by strapping your body down from the hips and shoulders it spreads out the impact across your body instead of putting impact on one specific spot. Seatbelts help your body slow down in a fast moving vehicle, this is important because a quick change in speed is what causes the most injury. Lastly, a seatbelt is so important to human safety because it protects our spinal cord by keeping us up straight and keeps our heads away from the dashboard, steering wheel or anything else that you could slam against causing concussions, brain damage or worse. In the State of Arizona, the laws are very lenient when it comes to the safety of drivers, Arizona allows drivers to talk on their cell phones, text message, and even allows for passengers to ride in the back of pickup trucks with no seatbelts or safety precautions. Although the state allows all of these

actions to be lawful, the only cell phone ban is for school bus drivers because the safety of our states children comes first when the topic is school bus safety. Arizona allows drivers 16 and 17 years of age with their drivers permits to use their cell phones, but has banned all school bus drivers from talking on their cell phones because of all of the innocent lives that are in the hands of this one person (GHSA). School bus fatalities are continuing to happen and a large percentage could be avoided by adding seatbelts to the busses. Due to studies done over the last 11 years, the annual crash rate for school busses is 26,000 per year, leaving 7,000 children with injuries and 1,000 with incapacitating injuries leaving them paralyzed or left in hospital beds (NHTSA). In this 11year study, they found on average there are 66 front end, side, rear end and rollover crashes that end in fatalities. Of these 66 per year, 42% of the casualties are from crashes that are caused by the busses rolling over due to driver error, weather, or possibly sharp turns these busses cannot handle. Experts agree that this 42% of casualties could be most easily prevented by seatbelts because it would keep the children strapped to their seats and not sending them flying through the cabin of the bus injuring themselves against

the walls, windows, or even other students (School Bus Fatalities and Injuries). With numbers as high and as shocking as the ones stated in the previous statistics, it is a wonder how school busses have not been equipped with seatbelts years and years ago, since the first motorized school bus was originally created in 1914 and had all of the children facing the each other in a circle, instead of seats facing the front of the bus. A main reason people are against the addition to seatbelts, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, is that the use of school busses keeps cars off the road. One school bus is equivalent to 36 cars transporting children and causing congestion around the school. Thirtysix cars per bus brings the total cars off the roads to 17.3 million cars every morning; which accounts for 2.3 billion gallons of fuel, which is roughly 6 billion dollars saved (NHTSA). The statistics are very eye-opening and bring up very good points about the job school busses are doing to keep our earth and transportation eco-friendly, yet while being fuel efficient and keeping the exterior of the busses a healthy environment to live in, the safety of the children on the interior is not where it could be if the busses were equipped with seatbelts.

Some people believe that the cost of seatbelts being added to school busses would be too expensive for not enough reward. Due to numbers from the NHTSA, the cost to install 3-point seatbelts in all large school busses would range between 183 and 252 million dollars (Frisman). Some faculty involved in school districts believe that the school busses that have not had safety updates in over 40 years are safe enough for the children that attend these schools to ride on a daily basis. The price of adding seatbelts to every large school bus will put a large dent in a schools budget and will not necessarily help the crisis, but by updating all of these busses safety features we would stop an estimated 1,900 child injuries per year (Frisman). Wearing a seatbelt is already a federal law in all motor vehicles in 32 of our 50 states, so why shouldnt this law apply to the children in our public school system that take the same amount of risk we do when on their way to school (Seat Belt Laws). With our children driving to school and back 5 days a week about 9 months out of the year, and the amount of fatalities that occur each year are still occurring, I believe it is time we stepped up and installed seatbelts in our school busses. Although the price is high for a full seatbelt installation over the country, we should at least start small and

begin putting the correct safety precautions into our busses. Many school districts and states have begun installing seatbelts and even made bills to pass laws in their states to make it a requirement. Even if seatbelts are only saving one childs life per year it should be enough for people to start thinking about the 26 million students riding busses to school each day, and the 480,000 school busses that may or may not be equipped with seatbelts (School Bus Safety Data).

Work Cited

Bigelow, Pete. (08/19/2013). Why dont most school busses have seatbelts? AOL Autos. Received from http://www.nsc.org/safety_road/DriverSafety/Pages/SeatBelts.aspx on (11/1/2013). Frisman, Paul. (1 Dec. 2009) "Seat Belts On School Busses." Connecticut General Assembly.. Web. Received from http://www.cga.ct.gov/2009/rpt/2009-R- 0419.htm on 10/26/13. Froetscher, Janet. (2013). Seat belts. National Seatbelt Council. Retrieved from http://www.nsc.org/safety_road/DriverSafety/Pages/SeatBelts.aspx on (11/1/2013). Johnson, Alex M. (12/29/2010). Why your childs school bus has no seatbelts. Today News. Retrieved from http://www.today.com/id/40820669/ns/us_newslife/#.UnRQtOtoR9U on (10/25/2013).

Orenstein, Beth. (20 May 2009) "Seat Belts: How They Save Lives." EverydayHealth.com.. Web. Received from http://www.everydayhealth.com/healthy-living/wearing-your-seatbelt.aspx on 10/26/13. School Bus Fatalities And Injuries. (2013) National Coalition Of School Bus Safety. Web. Received from http://www.ncsbs.org on 11/1/13. School Bus Safety Data. School Transportation News: Your Source for School Bus and Pupil Transportation News. Web. Received from http://www.stnonline.com/ on 11/1/13. Seat Belt Laws. (2011) Governors Highway Safety Association. Web. Received from http://www.ghsa.org/ on 10/25/13.

Strickland, David L. (2013). School busses. NHTSA. Received from http://www.nhtsa.gov/School-Buses on (11/1/2013).