I have been driving school buses for the last 10 years and there has always been debate as to whether or not school buses should be equipped with seat belts. There has not been a year gone by where legislation has been proposed in my state to have seat belts put on buses. Each year it has gone down to defeat.
Some would argue that it is for the safety of the children that seat belts be used on a bus. They say that it would prevent unnecessary deaths and injuries in accidents involving school buses. I would agree that there may be some occasions where this is true, and say that there are situations where that would not be true.
School buses are designed in every aspect for student safety in accidents. The padding on the seats are designed to cushion a blow from sudden stop accidents. The high back seats are designed to keep children in the seat area should an accident occur. The height and frame of the bus are designed to keep the major portion of a collision impact away from the students and to protect the large gas tank from impact to prevent fire. There are many escape areas to exit the bus from in various types of occurrences. The drivers are specially trained and hold special licenses and endorsements to provide the best drivers possible for safety. Everything about school buses is geared towards the safety of the students and practice and training are constants. There is not a safer vehicle on the road per capita. The problem is just not as big as the proponents make it out to be,
There are of course the cost factors. School buses are paid for by tax payer dollars. In the district I operate in, there are about 50 buses. Each bus costs around $200,000. Drivers earn anywhere from $12,000 to $30,000 a year based on how many routes they run. Fuel costs right now are over $4 a gallon and school buses get about 8 miles a gallon. Already we are in the millions. Adding seat belts to school buses would reduce the capacity of the school bus by 1/3. This would require us to buy another 17 buses, hire 17 drivers, and spend more on fuel and maintenance. This change right there is millions more.
One of the biggest concerns for drivers is the liability and responsibility. If there is an accident where a child gets injured because they did not wear their seat belt, who is responsible? A driver is alone on a bus with 65 students. They have to able to drive safely and maintain control of the students simultaneously. This is not an easy task. One of the proposals is to hire monitors for each bus to insure seat belt compliance. My district would require then 67 monitors to be hired and even at minimal costs, that is looking at $10,000 a year for each one, nearly of a million dollars.
Property taxes are high enough people claim and are voted down all the time. Where do the schools get the extra millions that seat belts would cost? There would be options, and most of them parents of school kids and the school kids themselves would not like. They would either do away with transportation all together, forcing parent to transport their own kids (certainly not good for greenhouse gasses). The schools could do away with extra curricular activities, no clubs, no sports teams (many would not be happy with that). Salaries would get frozen or cut, which would have the teachers unions on strike (nobody wants that). Our schools have enough trouble with funding as it is and to add the extra millions that the unfunded mandate of seat belt laws would put many districts in sever financial difficulties.
I spent some time driving for a preschool that had seat belts on the buses. Seat belts can and do cause injuries. Despite having monitors, kids will use the lap belts as weapons and hit each other with them. That was our number one cause for injuries on the bus when I drove for the pre school that had seat belts, cuts, bruises, and eye injuries were caused by this.
Another issue with having seat belts is in situations where school bus evacuations would be necessary such as fires or railroad crossings. The time for evacuations rose from 20 seconds to over a minute and a half with the instillation of seat belts. That extra minute can mean the difference between life and death in both fires and rail crossing incidents. In these situations, seat belt use would actually CAUSE deaths rather than preventing them.
In conclusion, I say no to the use of seat belts on school buses for both economic and safety reasons.