Duckworth: It's Time To Make School Buses Safer For Our Children

Parents of school-age children understand that weekday mornings are a ritual. We wake up our kids, pack their lunches, bundle them into their coats, keeping our fingers crossed we didn’t forget anything while rushing them to the bus stop. We wave goodbye as they wait for their school bus, hoping their ride is uneventful.

As a mother, the safety and security of my girls is always at the top of my mind—when they play on the jungle gym at the park, when they swim at the pool and, yes, when they ride the school bus with their classmates. And if you’re like me, you may have assumed that school buses, given the invaluable cargo they carry, adhere to the most stringent vehicle safety requirements.

But the reality is more frightening: Parents might not know that many of our nation’s school buses don’t even have basic safety equipment like seat belts or the ability to brake quickly in an emergency.

From 2012 to 2021, 998 school-transportation-related crashes in the United States left 1,110 people dead. We owe it to our children to do everything in our power to reduce that number to zero.

Safety experts learned this basic fact long ago: seat belts save lives. They’re commonplace in all sorts of transportation nowadays. They’re required in cars, motorcoaches and airplanes—so why wouldn’t we require them on school buses? That’s one reason why I wrote my School Bus Safety Act.

This danger to our children is not hypothetical. In Ohio last August, an 11-year-old elementary school student was killed when a bus overturned on their first day of school, a rollover that injured nearly two dozen other children as well.

Just like in most school buses around the country, these children’s seats lacked seat belts. And devastatingly—even more recently and even more close to home for us—we witnessed another tragedy in Rushville, Illinois, this spring, when a school bus crashed into a semi-truck, engulfing both vehicles in flames and killing each driver as well as the three young children who were onboard.

My bill would not only help protect our children during an accident, but it could help prevent accidents from happening in the first place as well by requiring technology like automatic emergency braking systems, which could help stop crashes by automatically stopping when vehicles or other objects are detected ahead of the school bus.

It would also require the technology necessary to suppress a fire in the event of a crash— all technologies that we take for granted in other motor vehicles and modes of transportation.

This legislation should not be controversial. It is exactly in line with longstanding recommendations from the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which has found that the construction used in school buses, known as “compartmentalization,” is simply not enough by itself to keep children safe when a bus rolls over or is involved in a severe crash.

Instead, if we want to truly do everything we can to protect our kids in those kinds of worst-case-scenario moments, NTSB has recommended requiring school buses to have three-point safety belts, along with collision-avoidance and fire suppression technology.

Some state and local school districts have taken it upon themselves to make their school transportation systems safer.

I commend states like California, Florida, New Jersey, New York and Texas that already require large school buses to be equipped with three-point seats belts at every seating location.

But as a parent, I refuse to accept a status quo where a child’s risk of serious injury or even death depends on the state where they live. And I will keep working until we ensure that this commonsense solution is implemented in every zip code, every school district, every state.

As we all get ready for this new schoolyear to begin, no mom should have to fear for her first-grader’s life when he picks up his backpack and climbs those three steps onto his bus. No dad should have to worry that his daughter won’t make it home from her class fieldtrip to the science museum in the next town over.

My School Bus Safety Act would deliver the necessary technology enhancements to actually help keep our children safe, putting parents’ minds at ease when they wave goodbye as the school bus pulls away from the curb. For the sake of our kids, for the sake of our families, the Senate has a moral obligation to pass this bill immediately.

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