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DALLAS (CBSDFW.COM) – A school bus crash in Tennessee on Monday afternoon left five children dead and restarted the debate about whether or not the vehicles should be equipped with legally mandatory seat belts. Most states do not require that school buses have seat belts.
The safety upgrade is an expensive undertaking. Installing a three-point seat belt, like what you would find in a car, for school bus seats would cost around $10,000 for just one entire vehicle.
Texas does not require school buses to have seat belts. However, Dallas County Schools, the transportation service for 11 local school districts, has already outfitted their entire fleet with the safety measure. They feel confident that such action can save a life.
Larry Duncan is the board president for Dallas County Schools, and said that you cannot put a price on a child’s life. “There’s nothing imaginable that could be worse than that school bus accident,” he said, commenting on the Tennessee incident. “Our hearts and prayers are with them.”
Dallas County Schools serves schools in Dallas, Carrollton, Cedar Hill, Coppell, DeSoto, Irving, Lancaster, Richardson, Aledo, Weatherford and White Settlement. They started retrofitting old buses with lap belts in 2009. That same year, they started to purchase new buses with three-point belts.
The service has more than 2,000 school buses in total, and all of them had some sort of seat belt by 2012. A $250,000 grant from the Texas Education Agency helped Dallas County Schools get it done. Their goal now is to upgrade those lap belts to three-point belts. That is expected to be complete within the next few years.
Of course, aside from cost, the other challenge is getting the children to sit down and buckle up. Dallas County Schools stated that bus drivers try to enforce the rule as much as they can while still being safe on the road. “We have live recorded video on our buses, inside and out,” Duncan said. “We follow up with our drivers, emphasize that with their training, and I cannot be more proud of our drivers. They take their responsibility for our kids seriously, and they do it on their own.”
