Officials are split on belts in buses

Federal transportation leaders are proposing a plan that would help school districts put seat belts on public school buses.

And while officials say seat belts are generally a good idea when it comes to transportation, some say they could be bad news for buses.

U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters last week proposed new rules that would allow school districts to use federal highway safety funds to equip school buses with seat belts.

Peters says the rules also would require higher seat backs to better protect younger children during accidents when older children or adults get thrown from their seats.

The Salt Lake City School District is the first in the state to have purchased a school bus with seat belts. It should arrive and start operating for secondary students in February.

"If you look at available data and think of the role seat belts play in protecting passengers in cars, on some levels it seems almost intuitively obvious that restraining passengers from flying around the inside of a school bus is a good idea," said Doug Nelson, president of the Salt Lake City Board of Education.

But state transportation leaders say strapping kids in on school buses would be very expensive and not much more safe.

"Economically, it's not the best decision — but the life of a child is worth anything we can do; we just don't know if it will be safer," said Kelly Orton, supervisor of auxiliary services for the Salt Lake City School District.

Murrell Martin, transportation specialist for the State Office of Education, said putting seat belts on school buses would reduce seating capacity, making the buses much less efficient. With the seat-belted buses, students could only sit two to a seat, which would mean school districts choosing to have the belted buses would have to increase their bus fleet by a third to serve the same amount of students.

That would also mean the district would have to hire more drivers and purchase more fuel.

According to a 2002 study by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, if all of the 474,000 school buses across America were required to have seat belts, in an average year the belts would "perhaps" save one life.

"That is because of the incredible safety in school buses," Martin said. "Typically there might be five to seven fatalities on school buses a year."