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JK
Top Member
USA
7307 Posts |
 Posted - 03/30/2005 : 11:44:35 AM
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Representative pushes bill, but state education official says it would be too costly
BY BRAD CAIN
The Associated Press
Mar 29 2005
Statesman-Journal
The state should end its indifference to children's safety by requiring seat belts on the thousands of school buses that crisscross Oregon's roads and highways, a legislator said Monday.
At a public hearing, Rep. Donna Nelson waved a copy of a newspaper article describing a Jan. 10 accident in which a school bus with 28 students slid into a ravine near the Yamhill County community of Dundee.
The students suffered minor injuries, the McMinnville Republican said.
"But will we continue to be as fortunate every time a school bus gets into an accident?" Nelson asked.
Nelson's bill drew opposition from a state education official who said that retrofitting buses with seat belts, although well-intentioned, would be an expensive step that would not necessarily improve safety.
Deborah Lincoln, the leader of the state Department of Education's student-transportation program, said that school-bus seats are designed to be energy-absorbing, passive, crash-restraint systems.
Also, Lincoln said, federal studies have shown that using lap belts in school buses can cause students to suffer fatal head and neck injuries when they are thrown forward in collisions.
The comments came as the House Transportation Committee opened hearings about Nelson's bill to require the estimated 6,000 school buses in Oregon to be equipped with safety belts.
According to state figures, there were about 400 crashes involving school buses in Oregon last school year, although most were minor and caused few injuries.
No students have been killed in a school-bus crash in Oregon since a 1976 bus-train wreck killed three children.
Lincoln said that only two states, New York and New Jersey, require school buses to be equipped with seat belts and that neither state requires riders to wear the belts.
Reconfiguring Oregon school buses to have seat belts would cost at least $9 million, she said, adding that it could cost millions more to hire people to monitor whether children are properly using the belts.
Nelson said she thinks that the department's cost estimates are inflated and said she will continue her quest for a school-bus seat-belt law.
"The value of life cannot be measured in terms of Department of Education dollar estimates," Nelson said.
Click Here for story
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Peter
Top Member
USA
1057 Posts |
Posted - 03/30/2005 : 7:33:15 PM
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| The world is awash in stupidity. |
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JK
Top Member
USA
7307 Posts |
Posted - 03/31/2005 : 12:34:05 PM
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quote:
Originally posted by Peter
The world is awash in stupidity.
Have no idea what the post, quoted above, means or how it relates to the story. Seems a waste of space to make such vague posts. (jk)
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This is a very popular Website. If you can't get in bookmark the page and try again later.
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Edited by - JK on 03/31/2005 12:35:33 PM |
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rltinkey
Senior Member
USA
140 Posts |
Posted - 04/02/2005 : 9:03:45 PM
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It has been several months since I last spoke with Deborah Lincoln at the Department of Ed. She is one the only person I know that has always wanted to be a bus driver and is now the number one bus driver in the state of Oregon. She represented the interest of school bus transportation and stated the reality of seat belt restraint systems on school buses.
You can install seat belts but inforcing the students to use them is a totally different game.
The fight has just started and if the regulation passes requiring seat belts, I want to see what the tax payers are going to say.
Ray The Bus Guy |
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Seat belts urged for school buses
