Controversy Swirls : School Bus Seat Belts: Safety Plus?

To Jeff Kraut, a pediatrician in rugged Mendocino County, the logic was simple: if seat belts save lives in cars, school buses should have them too.

So the soft-spoken father of two raised $750 from his physician friends, bought more than 100 seat belts and helped install them in four buses belonging to the Mendocino Unified School District.

In doing so, Kraut joined a grass-roots movement that has sprung up in school districts from Mendocino to suburban New York. When school started last fall, his tiny coastal district became the first--and only--school system in California to try belts in any of its regular buses.

“I’m happy because my daughter now comes home on a bus with seat belts on it,” Kraut said. “I don’t look on this as a political action. It’s getting something for my kids that will make their lives safe.”

Spurred by Deaths

Groups of parents across the nation, spurred by the deaths of children in bus accidents, have persuaded 75 local school boards to put seat belts in some or all of their buses. At least 14 more have agreed to begin using belts next fall.

New laws in California and other states that require motorists to wear seat belts in their cars have fueled the school bus campaign as it spreads to more communities and state capitals.

But controversy swirls around the big question of whether seat belts in school buses actually enhance safety.

Many school administrators, coach manufacturers and independent bus operators have resisted pressure to install seat belts, saying that the big yellow buses already are the safest vehicles on the road. Lap restraints are not cost effective, they say, and could even cause injury to children in an accident.

‘Easy to Be Emotional’

“Seat belts make it worse,” said California Supt. of Public Instruction Bill Honig. “Seat belts sound good because people think of cars. This is a serious situation because kids lives are at stake. It’s easy to be emotional about it.”

For several months, emotions have been running high in Mahopac, N.Y.

Sixth-grader Paul Goodrow was killed there last October when his school bus ran off the road and crashed into a tree. The 11-year-old student, who was sitting on the edge of his seat with one leg tucked under him, was thrown into the air and landed on the seat back in front of him, lacerating his liver. He walked off the bus but died of internal bleeding within 20 minutes.

Putnam County Coroner William Stahl investigated the accident and concluded that the youngster would not have died if he had been sitting squarely in his seat. “If he had a seat belt on, he wouldn’t have been killed,” Stahl said.

On Feb. 11, the Mahopac Central School District voted to require the installation of seat belts in 10 new buses it is purchasing.

The debate over seat belts also has raised a more fundamental safety concern: half of the nation’s public school bus fleet does not meet minimum safety standards set by the federal government nearly a decade ago, according to federal estimates.

Branded “rolling coffins” by one California legislator, outdated buses cannot be made safer merely by installing seat belts, both school administrators and seat belt advocates agree.

The seat backs in these buses, they say, are built with exposed metal bars that could increase the risk of head injury for strapped-in passengers who suddenly are thrown forward. In addition, belts anchored to floors of older buses could rip loose in an accident, causing greater harm to students who use the belts.

Reluctant to Buy

Both sides also agree that getting substandard buses off the road should be the first priority in improving school bus safety. But school officials are reluctant to buy new buses costing as much as $90,000 each when educational programs are suffering from a shortage of funds.

The deaths of two California students in bus accidents while on school trips last year has focused attention in Sacramento on the dangers of school bus transportation.

Long Beach high school senior Kristin Baker was killed when a chartered Greyhound bus taking her on a school ski trip overturned on an icy road in Utah, throwing her through a window and crushing her.

Sixth-grader Sean Purcell of Elk Grove died in June when the 1963 school bus in which he was riding ran into the back of a stalled milk truck on a freeway in Fremont, south of Oakland.

Highway Patrol Study

In January, the Assembly overwhelmingly approved a bill by Assemblywoman Gloria Molina (D-Los Angeles) that would require buses bought after June 30, 1987, to be equipped with seat belts if a proposed California Highway Patrol study shows they would be effective. Gov. George Deukmejian has promised to sign the measure if it clears the Senate.

Deukmejian last year vetoed a measure requiring school districts to replace outdated buses, but he has also proposed spending $100 million to replace some of the older vehicles.

In the past, legislative attempts in California to improve bus safety have met with little success, in part because of opposition from the state Department of Education and uncertainty among lawmakers over the effectiveness of lap restraints.

The battle over seat belts on buses is reminiscent of the fight 20 years ago to require car manufacturers to install safety belts in automobiles. Seat belt opponents argued that the restraints would cost too much and could injure passengers or trap them in their vehicles.

And now seat belt opponents have added a new argument--that the safety problems of school buses are quite different from cars. Because of the buses’ size, their occupants already are well protected, the opponents say. The buses are also safer than cars because they are highly visible, generally drive standard, approved routes of short duration and their drivers receive more training than average motorists.

Cost Estimates

Seat belts, which would cost between $1,200 and $1,800 per bus when installed by a contractor or manufacturer, would not be a cost-effective way of eliminating the few fatalities that occur in school buses, school administrators say.

The money, they say, could do more to improve bus safety if it were spent on such programs as driver training and vehicle inspections.

But advocates point to Westchester County, N.Y., where seat belts are credited with preventing injuries to children in two bus accidents last year.

In one accident, a school bus in the town of Ardsley was traveling about 25 miles an hour when it was hit head-on by a car and forced into a guard rail. Bus driver Carol Jones said all the students were wearing their seat belts and the only injury was to a boy who complained of a headache.

“I think seat belts did a lot,” Jones said. “The kids were still in their seats. The kids in the back didn’t know what happened. (Without seat belts), a lot of children would have been hurt.”

No Injuries in Accident

In neighboring Greenburgh, where students have been required to wear seat belts since 1979, a bus crashed into a telephone pole last April. No one was hurt because the pupils wore their seat belts, said parents and children alike.

Some Greenburgh students complain that the restraints are uncomfortable, but they wear them most of the time anyway. “I usually wear it because I don’t want to die. I’m too young,” said Justina Berkowicz, 11.

Supporters of seat belts in school buses include the California Highway Patrol, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the PTA, race car driver Mario Andretti, and the National Coalition for Seat Belts on School Buses, an organization of parents that has led the safety movement in dozens of school districts across the country.

Carol Fast, founder of the coalition, said seat belts not only prevent injuries but improve discipline on buses and teach children to use the safety devices whenever they are on the road.

The dispute over seat belts is complicated by the fact that crash-testing of school buses has been limited and findings have been inconclusive.

Might Cause Injury

California schools chief Honig, who is seeking reelection, cited a 1985 Canadian government study to support his contention that seat belts cause injury and said, “The research is saying seat belts actually have lower safety.”

Among problems identified by the study are serious upper body and head injuries to passengers who are strapped in as they are thrown forward from the waist into the seat back in front of them. Without a belt, a passenger’s entire body would be thrown forward into the cushioned seat back, producing fewer injuries, the research concluded.

“We don’t have any scientific data to lead us to believe that seat belts will enhance the safety of school pupils in school buses,” said Ron Kinney, the California Department of Education’s transportation specialist.

However, the CHP and the coalition, among others, contend that the study’s findings are inaccurate because the Canadian government tested only front-end collisions using adult-size, inflexible dummies that did not respond in a crash as children would.

“There are flaws in the methodology that are obvious to everyone who reads (the study),”said CHP Assistant Chief D. O. Helmick. “We clearly believe that seat belts in buses would help.”

Study’s Scope Limited

According to Fast of the seat belt coalition, the study also is defective because it did not analyze other kinds of accidents, including sideways collisions or rollovers.

Assemblywoman Molina’s bill would attempt to put an end to the crash-test controversy by requiring the CHP to conduct a new study of the effectiveness of seat belts on school buses. The study would be carried out under a contract with an independent agency. If it finds that seat belts work--as Molina expects it will--her measure would require buses bought after June of 1987 to be equipped with lap restraints.

The Department of Education has taken no position on the bill. At an Assembly hearing, the measure drew the backing of Terri Peterson, whose daughter, Kristin Baker, was killed in the Utah crash that also injured two dozen other students. Peterson has also called for the use of seat belts on charter vehicles such as Greyhound buses--a proposal not included in Molina’s measure.

Despite highly publicized reports of school bus accidents, school officials point out that the vehicles have the best safety record of any form of road transportation.

According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, school buses had an average of .48 deaths for every 100 million miles traveled during the years 1977 to 1982. By comparison, there were 2.35 deaths for every 100 million miles traveled by car during the same period, a ratio of nearly 5 to 1.

‘Many Times Safer’

“Any school bus is many, many times safer than riding in an automobile,” Kinney said. “I would guess that riding on a bus is a lot safer than playing on a playground.”

However, Fast charged that the federal statistics are skewed, because many accidents are never recorded in the localities where they occur.

For example, she pointed out that the CHP does not list as school bus fatalities the deaths of 27 members of the Yuba City High School choir and an adult adviser in a tragic 1976 bus crash in Martinez.

A CHP spokesman explained that these deaths were not counted because the vehicle, a school bus that had been taken out of daily service, was not officially certified as a school bus at the time of the crash.

The federal standards require all school buses manufactured after 1977 to have high-back, padded seats spaced closely together to “compartmentalize” passengers in case of an accident. The roofs and sides of buses must provide protection in case of rollovers and the floors must be reinforced so that the seats do not tear loose in an accident. Installation of seat belts was made optional. (Safety belts are required in school vans, which are often used to transport handicapped children.)

Many Older Buses

According to CHP records, California’s public schools have an even higher proportion of older buses than does the nation as a whole. As of June, 1985, there were 8,422 school buses on the road that did not meet 1977 federal standards and only 5,083 buses that did.

The Legislature last year approved a bill designed to force school districts to remove the older buses from the road by 1991.

Deukmejian vetoed the measure, saying that it would cost too much, at least $175 million. The governor, running for reelection, came back in January with a proposal in his state budget to spend $100 million to replace about 1,300 buses.

The Department of Education’s Kinney compared the post-1977 system of “compartmentalization” to air bags in automobiles and said, “It’s almost like a padded cell.” He cited a January accident in Norco as evidence that the newer buses can protect bus passengers without seat belts.

In that collision, a school bus overturned when it was rear-ended by an egg truck. One student was hospitalized overnight while six other students and the driver suffered minor injuries.

Children Thrown Out

However, the Highway Patrol reported that witnesses saw three children thrown from the back of the bus by the force of the collision. One witness, Marjorie Gilstrap, said later that she was driving behind the bus and saw the youngsters ejected from the rear emergency door of the bus. She stopped her car, ran to the children and helped them out of the street.

“As far as the children coming out the back door,” she said, “seat belts would have helped.”

Some school officials also are concerned that if they install seat belts, they may be held liable for injuries suffered by a student who does not buckle up. However, a recent Texas case suggests that districts may incur greater liability by not providing students with seat belts.

In Rio Grande City in southwestern Texas, 6-year-old Alejandro Aguirre was standing on a seat in his school bus with his head out the window when the vehicle pulled away from the curb. His head was crushed when the bus passed a utility pole.

Aguirre’s family, charging among other things that the bus should have been equipped with seat belts, won a $500,000 settlement, including $175,000 from the manufacturer of the bus, Carpenter Body Works.

Must Convince Riders

Once a school district decides to install seat belts, it still must convince students to wear them.

“It’s one thing to put belts in the buses,” said Mendocino schools Supt. Don Kirkpatrick. “It’s another thing to get them used.”

Two districts at opposite ends of the country, the Greenburgh Central School District No. 7 in New York, the first school system in the nation to install belts, and Mendocino, the first in California, illustrate contrasting approaches to the problem.

In Mendocino, Kraut’s campaign to put belts on buses did not include a requirement that students wear them. No student education on the need for seat belts preceded their installation and little effort was made to enlist the crucial support of bus drivers.

Mixed Success

As a result, the seat belt experiment has met with mixed success.

In three smaller buses, which transport primarily younger students, fewer than half the children wore their belts. In the district’s largest bus, the older students preferred to buckle the belts across the aisles than across their laps. After about a month, district officials removed the belts from all but the first three rows of the large bus.

“Nobody wears them,” said Abra Brayman, 12, a passenger on the big bus. “I wore them at first because I thought we had to. But then when I saw nobody else was, I stopped.”

Bus driver Steve Miller requested removal of the belts after the distraction of students playing with them nearly caused him to hit a truck broadside.

‘Tying Each Other Up’

“It was just chaos,” Miller said. “Nobody was wearing them. They were tying each other up.”

But in Greenburgh, the safety restraints were credited with preventing injury and possibly death in the bus crash last April.

Unlike Mendocino, Greenburgh operates a continuing education program to encourage pupils to buckle up since one part of the bus driver’s job is to make sure students wear seat belts. Corda estimated that more than 90% of the elementary school students wear the belts while about 85% of the high school students follow suit.

“When you stop, you don’t want to worry about them falling into the aisles,” said James Clines, a bus driver and driver trainer. “If you educate the kids, it won’t distract from the driving.”