Over the past several decades, seat belt laws have expanded to cover all 50 states. Although it is left to each state to determine the specific laws, in general, if you are riding in the car with a child then they need to be restrained unless they are over the age of 16. The reason is that car accidents remain one of the biggest causes of childhood deaths and injuries in America.
There is no argument that seat belts save lives, so instilling laws for parents to do the right thing just makes sense. However, when it comes to other forms of transportation, like school buses, not many states have mandates about what type of restraints they must have or how children must be transported. In Texas, after several school bus accidents with huge consequences, lawmakers are considering making it mandatory to wear a seatbelt when you get on the big yellow bus to go to school.
It would only make sense that your child should be as protected in someone else’s vehicle as they should be in your car, so the lack of seat belts on many school buses – not just across Texas but across the United States – simply doesn’t make any sense.
A Texas law that was established over ten years ago stating that school buses must be equipped with shoulder seat belts has barely caught on. In fact, only a minority of the buses are up to the law a decade later. After a fatal bus crash in 2006, Ashley and Alicia’s Law was enacted, mandating that every new bus purchased by a school have the three-point seat belt.
With the help of a bus accident lawyer, a woman who lost her daughter to a school bus accident in September of 2015 is just one victim lobbying to not only enforce the rule for buses to have seat belts, but to make sure that they use them. Sheanine Chatman lost her daughter when the child’s bus went over the overpass and plunged 21 feet onto the road below.
Chatman was one of two children who was killed. Two others sustained severe injuries. The biggest contributor to the deaths and severity of injuries is that none of the children were wearing seat belts, according to investigators who were at the scene. Advocates have been pushing for seat belt use on school and transportation buses since the law was passed, but it seems like their pleas are falling on deaf ears. With no real enforcement or consequences for not following the rules, there isn’t much incentive to take the extra initiative to ensure that children are following the rules.
Sylvia Garcia, a Democratic state senator, has presented a bill that would require each child to have a three-point seat belt on every school bus that operates in the state. A three-point belt has not just the lap belt, which does very little to secure a child when in a crash, but also has a shoulder belt – the same shoulder belt that is required in any other moving vehicle.
Garcia insists that everyone who gets behind the wheel with their child understands the gravity of what being safe in a car entails for their kid, but then they say goodbye at the bus doors and have no proof that their children are being taken care of safely.
Texas is one of the “click it or ticket” states and puts a large portion of their transportation budget into seat belt campaigns and enforcement at the private motorist level. However, they need to do a better job on buses, where there can be up to 100 children being transported at one time.
Even when it is most critical that kids be restrained, no one seems to be putting much effort into enforcement. Although over $10 million was earmarked to purchase new school buses that comply with the law, nearly 99% of the schools across Texas have not done so.
Many educators maintain that it might be because the money allocated only relates to purchasing new school buses, instead of just retrofitting school buses that are fairly new and can last for decades. According to experts, it only costs about $8,000-10,000 to retrofit an old bus, but since the state doesn’t include that in their allocation, school districts simply don’t have the money in the budget to comply.
To date, an average of six children a year die in school bus crashes. That is six too many. A new push needs to be focused on converting old buses and enforcing seat belt laws, so that another Chatman accident never happens again. It is now in the hands of the Texas government to figure out the best way to gain compliance, but they must do so.
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