POLL: Bill filed to push seat belts on Arkansas school buses

Back when he was 17, state Rep. Mark McElroy says, he was once hired to drive a school bus carrying cheerleaders from his native McGehee up the winding, ice-covered Pig Trail to Fayetteville.

It's a wonder, he recalled last week, that no one was hurt or killed.

Recently re-elected to his third term in the General Assembly, McElroy, D-Tillar, has filed a bill to push school districts to buy new buses equipped with seat belts. He says it's about time to change decades-old assumptions about school bus safety.

Federal safety regulations dating back to 1977 require school buses to use "compartmentalization" -- the boxlike space made by higher seats with protective padding on the back -- to protect children in the event of a crash.

For the first time last year, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration updated its stance to favor seat belts, when Administrator Mark Rosekind announced they should be standard on every school bus.

However, the administration has not taken the step of requiring school buses to be equipped with seat belts.

"Now [federal officials] say that seat belts do save lives," McElroy said in an interview. "They stopped short of mandating because of the money. When they say it's not about the money, it's about the money."

The cost of a new school bus increases by as much $10,000 to include seat belts on every seat, McElroy said, and school districts don't have the money in their budgets to pay that price.

Instead of offering a state grant, McElroy's proposal, House Bill 1002, would require school districts to study the cost of requiring seat belts on new bus purchases if more than 10 percent of the voters in the district file a petition seeking the requirement.

After determining the cost to require seat belts, the district must place a millage tax to cover the costs on the ballot during the next regularly scheduled election. If the tax passes, the seat belts would be required.

"I don't want to mandate it. This is a local control-type bill," McElroy said.

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The Legislature considered a law in 2001 that would have required all new school buses in the state to be equipped with seat belts and that students wear them. However, the bill died in the House Education Committee.

The sponsor of the 2001 bill, then-state Rep. Mike Creekmore, D-Little Rock, later told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that he received opposition from school administrators and bus manufacturers.

Brad Montgomery, the director of the Arkansas Division of Public School Academic Facilities and Transportation, said his office has reviewed McElroy's legislation but has yet to take a position on it.

Superintendents are more likely to support the most recent iteration of seat-belt legislation because they would not be required to add the expense without the support of voters, said Richard Abernathy, executive director of the Arkansas Association of Educational Administrators.

"It was more or less forced on schools [before], and this one is much more open to the local communities," Abernathy said Friday.

While superintendents are likely to support public efforts to install seat belts, White Hall Superintendent Larry Smith said he questioned how bus drivers would enforce the rule, and if school districts would be liable if children are injured while not wearing the restraints.

"The feeling behind it is good, but I don't know how enforceable it will be," Smith said.

Six states have laws to require that seat belts be installed in school buses, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, but some of those states -- such as Louisiana -- have not approved funding to implement the rule.

Children who are told to wear seat belts in other vehicles notice their absence in school buses, McElroy said. Like Creekmore 15 years earlier, he said his law stemmed from a conversation with an inquisitive student.

At last year's Cattlemen's Pie Auction in Star City, seventh-grader Hannah Alder, who had just completed a project on the use of seat belts in buses, approached the state representative and asked him to take action, both said in separate interviews.

"The bus driver gets a seat belt and we don't, so he wrecks, he's safe and we're not," Hannah said in a phone interview. "One day it could happen very easily."

Hannah testified before the Senate Education Committee in March about her concerns, and said she expects to speak at the state Capitol in Little Rock again if lawmakers consider McElroy's bill. The regular legislative session starts Jan. 9.

The recent deaths of six schoolchildren in a bus crash in Chattanooga, Tenn., have restarted a nationwide debate on the lack of seat belts in school buses. McElroy said he hoped his colleagues would be more attentive to his bill after seeing the news of that tragedy.

"It's kind of that knee-jerk reaction. The reality sets in that it might be a month or two months before it goes to a vote, it has to get out of committee," McElroy said. "The sad part is after two weeks, people forget, they forget that it's very real."

McElroy's bill was filed Nov. 15, four days before the bus crash in Tennessee.

IC Bus and Blue Bird Corp., two of the largest U.S. bus manufacturers, did not respond to questions for this story.

In 2007, the Arkansas Supreme Court said IC Bus, which at the time had a plant in Conway, was not liable for making buses without seat belts because the state had never passed a law requiring them. The bus company had been sued by the families of the victims of a 2004 Siloam Springs bus crash that killed one student and injured seven.

More than two decades earlier, in 1983, four students and five teachers were killed when a Jonesboro School District bus heading to the State Skills Olympics overturned into a ditch going around a sharp turn on Arkansas 18.

Fatal rollover crashes are rare, according to the federal highway safety agency, but are among the types of crashes where three-point seat belts would have the greatest effect.

The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration most recently reviewed its school bus safety rules in 2011, when it declined a petition to require seat belts after estimating nationwide installation in larger buses would cut annual school-bus crash fatalities from five to three.

The cost of installing seat belts would limit districts' ability to provide bus transportation, potentially causing an increase of between 10 and 19 annual fatalities among children forced to take other, less safe, ways to school, the administration found.

Smaller buses that typically carry between 10 and 20 children are required by the administration to have three-point seat belts.

A Section on 12/05/2016