“We did a count the second week of March, right before spring break,” said Walter Prothro, director of TISD transportation. “There were no buses overloaded.”
Prothro said they do a count once or twice a month, but never on a scheduled basis.
“The drivers don’t know when it’s (the count) going to be. We keep it random for state reporting purposes,” he said.
Jackie Ward, transportation director of Belton ISD, said they also do monthly counts.
“We’ll do weekly or monthly head-counts,” she said. “But, also, if we see a driver come in with a full bus, or if he reports that the bus is getting too full, then we’ll make adjustments.”
The Temple parents’ complaints apparently were based on the fact that schoolchildren are often placed three to a seat on a standard school bus. Apparently, in the minds of concerned parents, this seemed too stuffy for comfort or safety.
But, according to Texas state regulations, three to a seat is considered perfectly safe, as long as all three passengers are contained in the confines of the seat, Prothro said. Kids hanging off the edge or lopping over into the aisle is a different matter.
“Three to a seat is totally acceptable,” Prothro said. “If you have a 78-passenger bus, three 13-inch little butts in a seat is perfectly acceptable. Of course, when you get to the older kids, these 78-passenger buses can sometimes hold only 48 or 49. But on the average bus that carries pre-K through fifth grade, three to a seat is totally acceptable.”
The 13-inch backsides that Prothro refers to comes from a standardized figure based on the 12.8-inch hip breadth of a fifth percentile adult female test dummy, as specified in the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard. A fifth percentile adult female dummy is about 4 feet 11 inches tall and weighs 102 pounds.
Of course, some schoolchildren are larger than this statistic, and legislation does make exceptions for children who are bigger than the standard.
The National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services states, “School buses transport passengers in a wide range (of) sizes. Accordingly, it is not possible to define the absolute capacity of a school bus under all conditions. The typical school bus seat is 39 inches wide and generally is considered to have a maximum seating capacity of three. This capacity rating is not meant to be a measure of the absolute capacity of the school bus seat for all sizes of passengers.”
Ms. Ward said that younger Belton students are very often seated in threes. But, with older kids, they try to give them more space.
“With upper grades, we try to sit two to a seat,” she said. “But, yes, there are times when we have to do three to a seat with those too. We try to do two for the older kids, but sometimes three to a seat happens.”
Prothro agreed, commenting that discretionary cases are generally left up to the bus drivers.
“When you get up to the fourth and fifth grades, there are some heavy hitters. The drivers will make sure the kids are seated right, both for safety and disciplinary purposes,” he said. “Some drivers will make a seating chart; some won’t. That’s not a requirement. Some kids are trouble makers; some aren’t. Sometimes they’ll move kids to the front to keep an eye on them.”
Discipline can be quite a large undertaking when the standard bus carries as many as 78 children at a time and only one driver.
“Well, there is new legislation that requires the kids to be in the confines of the seat,” Ward said. “We can’t have anybody out in the aisle.”
Prothro said the aisle rule is based on a safety design called compartmentalization.
“If the bus is in an accident, if the kids are properly sitting in that compartment, their knees will hit the padded seat in front of them,” he said. “While they may get a bump or a bruise, they won’t go flying into the aisle or out the window. If they have something hanging out in the aisle, or if they’re standing up, they could be in danger. But compartmentalization says that the seat will protect them if they’re properly seated.”
Of course, none of these “compartments” have seat belts, though Texas legislation did just change as far as that’s concerned.
“Well, the state law that was passed basically states that they want school buses purchased in 2010 and thereafter to have three-point seat belts,” Prothro said. “It was all based on disasters that happened in those big commercial buses. What people don’t realize is that it doesn’t properly apply to school buses.”
What Prothro means is that school buses are standardly equipped with a lot of safety enhancements that neither commercial buses nor cars have.
“Commercial buses are not as safe as school buses because school buses have all types of design features that other vehicles don’t have,” he said.
“Things like reinforced bow strength so that when they roll they don’t crush inwards. They also have smaller windows - not like those big Plexiglass windows that pop right out on commercial buses,” he said. “School buses have cages around their fuel tanks. If something hits the fuel tank side of the bus, it’s not going to leak inside. There are just a ton of safety features. People don’t realize that when their kids go launching off, if they’re in a school bus, they’re in much less danger.”
According to the Transportation Research Board, only 2 percent of motor vehicle crashes during school travel hours are school bus-related. The other 98 percent involve passenger vehicles, pedestrians, bicyclists or motorists.
Thus, Prothro said the seat belt legislation for school buses costs more than it is worth. He said retrofitting an old bus with new seatbelts costs somewhere between $8,000 and $11,000, while adding the seat belt feature to a new bus will add an extra $7,000 to $8,000 to the bill.
This is in addition to the $80,000 plus price that buses generally cost.
It’s also in addition to skyrocketing gas prices.
“And you already know what the price of gas is doing,” Prothro said.
Twenty-two years ago, he said, the state funded 70 percent of school transportation. Today, it’s more like 30 to 35 percent. Plus, the recent state seat belt legislation did not allocate a budget to employ the project.
“They didn’t fund it,” Prothro said. “Of course, we want to do everything we can to make the kids safer. But the other part of the equation is this: most seats will only be able to take two belts. That reduces the capacity of buses that usually carried three to a seat. That means buying more buses, hiring drivers.”
And, when school funds are already tight, “the tens of thousands of dollars that it would cost to install seat belts would ultimately be null and void compared to their effect,” he said.
Prothro also mentioned the impossibility of the time factor.
“We’re trying to get kids to school efficiently. We don’t have a lot of time. We don’t even have time to take roll. Drivers have to load the bus and make sure everyone’s seated. If, in addition to that, you had to do the whole airline trick to make sure everyone’s buckled up, well it’d be impossible. And, by the time you were ready to drive, there’s no way to tell if they stayed buckled up. Then it becomes an enforcement issue - which we already have plenty of. There’s just not time.”
