Most students are not injured in the vast majority of cases when other vehicles collide with the school bus. The Driver and/or passengers in the other vehicle are far more likely to be injured or killed. When colliding with a school bus most private vehicles underride the bus frame. The smaller vehicles are severely damaged through crush and passenger compartment intrusion. While this underride collision occurs in one-tenth of a second the students and driver on the bus have the advantage of a bus floor that is elevated 30 inches off the ground. The higher center of gravity and greater mass of the bus enables the students to receive far less Delta V force and less intrusion into the school bus passenger compartment. Yet private vehicles impacting a school bus in a lateral collision can cause that bus to overturn. A 90 degree rotation to the driver side shown as above is a major student occupant displacement in all thirteen row seats from front to back. Students on the driver side sitting three or two to a seat are pressed against the bus wall and window frame on their side others seated across the aisle experience a 7 foot fall. Those falling students collide with the students already pressed against the driver side wall. During some bus rollovers students are catapulted against their neighbors, or against the ceiling of the bus or against the bus wall or windows. Any of those collision surfaces in the bus are not people friendly. We have all seen a short video of a bus overturning 90 degrees to the driver side on ABCNews.com and how quickly in real time the occupant displacement occurs. None of the parents viewing such a short and dramatic video would ever want their child to be on that bus that overturned. All of us wish those students who were in the accident were not injured. The physics of an overturned bus argue otherwise. What can be done to decrease injuries with school bus rollovers?

TOPIC THREE BEST FIX: Seatbelts on school buses will reduce the occupant displacement and collision injuries occurring between students in opposite seat rows but not necessarily the collisions that can occur between seatmates when all students on the bus are secured by a seatbelt. Seatbelts in school bus accidents are considered by many in the school industry as an unnecessary and even dangerous process. We at SBAR disagree. Seatbelts reduce the level of severity of injuries for many students. Seatbelts prohibit ejections from inside the bus to outside where fatalities usually occur.

Topic Three Quick Fix #1: Meet with the school board members to require funding for new bus purchases that are seat belt equipped. Anyone who opposes you in that request should be asked: "If your child was on a bus without a seatbelt then would you also not require him or her to wear a seatbelt in your car or SUV?" Most school boards have to replace their buses every 10 or 12 years. By purchasing new buses with seat belts it would take 10 to 12 years to have the entire bus fleet so equipped. So for the parents who are genuinely concerned this solution is not a sufficient one without being in combination with other solutions.

Topic Three Quick Fix #2: School board members often avoid confrontations with concerned parents and cite their reason for avoiding seatbelt purchases on new buses and seatbelt retrofits in the existing bus fleet to the "prohibitive costs and manhours required to retrofit their existing buses."

Topic Three Quick Fix #3: Some board members argue: "If all school buses can't have seatbelts then none should have them!" This is used as an excuse not to have anyone in seatbelts on any of the buses. This argument is not valid since most school board members may not know that most—if not all—of their special needs bus fleet do have seatbelts for every student, securements for every students using a wheelchair or other mobility aid, securement for every preschooler riding in a bus seat in a child safety seat. They also do not know that seatbelts have been consistently in special needs transportation for more than a quarter century.

Topic Three Quick Fix #4: The school board member may wish to quote many different leaders in the school bus industry statements as literal fact such as: "If buses are equipped with seat belts the students will not use them. If they are carefully supervised the students will use those seatbelts as weapons against other seatmates." If this were true on special needs buses there would be very few survivors for 14 to 15 years of special needs or lift bus service when belts were used by everyone. Why would it be any different on regular buses of which 5 students or more on each 73 passenger bus are already in special education?

Topic Three Quick Fix #5: Many school board members do not realize that a large percentage of the passengers in their entire bus fleet are Pre-Ks, Kindergarteners and other very small people who weigh less than 40 pounds. They also may not be aware that any child under 40 pounds must be secured in any private vehicle or school bus with an appropriately fitted and secured child safety restraint system (CSRS). Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS) prohibits CSRS users from being secured in a non-seatbelt ready school bus seat. The same FMVSS requires that all seats that use a seatbelt or lapbelt have reinforced frames and are "seatbelt ready." Looping seat belts around the frame of nonseatbelt ready bus seat is not only dangerous, but it is illegal. Looping seatbelts around nonreinforced seat frames does not demonstrate "due diligence" by the school board and all of its employees to violate the federal safety standards for child safety seats.