Menu
- New nursing home rules threaten rural communities (4/23/24)
- Human wages, robot purchases in lock-step (4/11/24)
- Heed the call for caution this year in road work zones (4/9/24)
- This year, heed the call for caution in highway work zones (4/9/24)
- Railroad safety should not be left to contract negotiations (4/5/24)
- Rejecting LB764 upholds fairness in Nebraska (4/4/24)
- A wake-up call for young adults: Get your cancer checkups (4/2/24)
Editorial
Should school buses have seat belts?
Thursday, February 26, 2015
Seatbelts have been required in American cars since the early 1960s, but not in school buses.
Why not?
That's what Dawn Prescott of Fremont wants to know, urging Nebraska lawmakers to adopt LB373, offered by Sen. Robert Hilkeman of Omaha, which would require public school buses purchased after Jan. 1, 2016 to come equipped with lap-shoulder belts. Schools would have to demonstrate twice a year how to properly wear the belts.
Prescott is entitled to her opinion. She was a chaperone when a school bus careened off a bridge and into a creek bed on its way back from a band trip to Omaha in 2001.
She survived by hanging on to an overhead luggage rack during the crash. Her seatmate, who was another parent, and her 14-year-old son, Benjamin, and another passenger were killed.
"The bus driver that day was the only person on the bus with the option to buckle up," she said. The driver survived.
The state already requires seat belts on buses that weigh less than 10,000, but a school board lobbyist argued that national research hasn't shown whether seat belts improve safety on larger school buses.
A Bellevue school official raised other concerns, such as evacuation during a fast-moving fire, and the inability of drivers to keep all students buckled up.
But we've heard the same arguments against car seatbelts, from people fearful of becoming trapped following an accident. Yes, that is possible to become trapped, but the chance of escape is considerably better if a driver isn't knocked unconscious or otherwise incapacitated in a crash because he wasn't buckled in.
If it passes, Nebraska would become the seventh U.S. state to require seat belts for school buses, behind California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey, New York and Texas. The Legislature's fiscal office estimates it would cost school districts between $8,000 and $15,000 per bus.
We're not convinced seatbelts would actually make school buses safer, and would like to see more concrete data in addition to anecdotal information.
But at the very least, having seatbelts in school buses might help enforce discipline if students are required to stay buckled in.