They aren’t needed on school buses

Published 9:00 pm Monday, February 9, 2004

In reference to your recent story about school bus seat belts (“School bus seat belts sought,” Wednesday): As a school bus driver for several years, I believe installing seat belts in school buses is a knee-jerk reaction to a perceived problem that does not exist.

Modern school buses are designed with impact-absorbing seats to protect students in the event of an accident. School buses are the safest mode of ground transportation available. Most fatalities involving school buses happen outside of the bus.

Seat belts would require an aide on each trip to assure the students were secured and safely buckled in, to avoid injury from the seat belt itself. The driver is far too busy watching traffic, maintaining order during loading and unloading, and just driving the bus to undertake the additional responsibility of correctly securing students in seat belts, especially when dealing with as many as 50 or 60 students. All it would take is for a school bus to catch fire or go into the water with panicked students scrambling to escape through a tangled web of seat belts, to show the foolishness of such an idea.

In addition, with education dollars being in short supply, the cost of installing seat belts and hiring aides to ride the buses would far exceed the half a million dollars Sen. Rosemary McAuliffe proposes to implement the program. I suggest Sen. McAuliffe ride a few school buses, and perhaps she’ll re-think her proposal.

Everett