Among the worst news bulletins anyone fears to hear are the ones that begin, "A bus carrying schoolkids today crashed."

But life has a way of balancing bad news with good news and the recent bus crash carrying the American Fork High School marching band in Idaho, which resulted in one fatality and numerous injuries, and the runaway bus carrying the Layton Christian Academy football team in Parleys Canyon, which severely damaged the bus but caused no injuries, shed light on one of the best friends a school kid ever had:

The school bus.

Amid predictable concerns about whether adolescents are safe riding together in a bus, a couple of points were quickly publicized:

One, the recent bus problems involved non-school charter buses, not the familiar yellow school bus.

Two, the familiar yellow school bus remains about as safe as riding in a tank — in Switzerland.

Here in Utah, 172,000 kids are transported by yellow bus daily to and from school and on other school-related extracurricular trips. And no one can remember the last time someone died or was seriously injured in a crash.

"It's certainly beyond my memory," says Murrell Martin, transportation specialist at the State Office of Education. "You would have to go back several years I'm sure."

Nationally, 26 million schoolchildren take the bus every day. Over the course of the year they collectively travel over 4 billion miles. On average, they generate seven to nine fatalities a year.

Granted, that's seven to nine deaths too many, but, still, a microscopic contribution to the 42,000 who die on average on America's highways annually.

Yellow bus injuries are also almost nonexistent. Granite School District, for instance, is Utah's largest district. It has a fleet of 181 school buses that drive 1.2 million miles every year. According to Tom Given, the district's transportation director, an average year will see maybe five crash-related injuries serious enough to require medical treatment.

"It is phenomenal, the safety of these buses," says Given. "It's a wonderful protection for the kids. They ride in these tanks that weigh 30,000 pounds and are high enough off the ground to be above most things that can hurt them. The parents that drive their children don't understand that they have a much higher chance of an accident that's serious than if they just sent their kids on the bus."

At the state office, Martin cites statistics from the American School Bus Council to back up Given's claim.

"Kids who ride with their parents to school are nine times more likely to be involved in a fatality than in a school bus," he says, "and that's with the parents driving, everyone wearing seat belts, the whole thing."