Call Renewed to Put Seat Belts on Buses

An emotional rally Monday in memory of a Long Beach high school student killed in a bus accident last month in northern Utah featured a renewed call for state legislation requiring seat belts on school and charter buses.

“You can take her determination and carry it on,” Long Beach City Councilwoman Jan Hall told the packed gymnasium at Wilson High School, where 17-year-old Kristin Baker was an honor student and a varsity yell leader. “It (legislation) will be her living monument in this state forever.”

Kristin was killed Dec. 30 when a chartered Greyhound bus carrying students to a holiday ski retreat in Sun Valley, Ida., skidded and overturned on an icy road. Baker, who like the 43 other students was not wearing a seat belt, was thrown through a window and crushed under the bus. Twenty-three students were hurt.

Hall told the crowd she would place a resolution before the City Council today firmly putting the city on record as in favor of seat belts for buses used to transport young people. A new state law, which went into effect Jan. 1, requires seat belts for most vehicles, but it does not apply to buses.

Ron Kinney, supervisor of school transportation for the state Department of Education, said that school buses built since 1977 are equipped with large, federally mandated padded seats, which tests have shown to be more effective in preventing injury than seat belts. Equipping buses with belts, he said, would be both costly and ineffective.

Not everyone agrees. Assemblywoman Gloria Molina (D-Los Angeles) has introduced legislation that would require all new school buses to be equipped with belts. And state Sen. Milton Marks (R-San Francisco) has authored a similar bill.

Hall says the bill she envisions differs in two important respects: It would require charter buses and both existing and new school buses, to be fitted with belts.

Assemblyman Dennis Brown (R-Signal Hill) said he supported Hall’s proposal, but would meet with Molina before deciding whether to author his own legislation or support Molina’s. Sen. Robert G. Beverly (R-Redondo Beach) was less convinced, saying only that he would work with Hall in “reviewing the problem” to come up with a solution.

The California Highway Patrol says only eight of the state’s 92,186 traffic fatalities since 1966 involved children in school buses.

To Kristin’s friends, though, she was clearly more than a statistic, and that was why they planned Monday’s tribute in the form of a pep rally, featuring her favorite yell performed by the remaining members of the pep squad.

“I have no doubt at all that if my daughter had been wearing a seat belt she would be alive today,” said Terri Peterson, Kristin’s mother, who attended the rally. “I feel that the only purpose served by her death will be to see . . . that it doesn’t happen again.”