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Click it or ticket - the national advertising campaign to get drivers and passengers to wear a seatbelt.  According to the National Highway Traffic & Safety Administration (“NHTSA”), wearing a seatbelt is the number one most effective precaution against death in a car accident. Yet, only 20% of the U.S.’s approximately 480,000 school buses have seatbelts.

The theory is that school buses provided a compartmentalization between seats that effectively protects passengers, who are mostly children, from injury.  

NHTSA reports that buses account for just 0.2 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles traveled, compared with the 1.44 fatality rate for regular cars and trucks. That calculates to approximately six children killed in a school bus accident annually.  

With children being the most vulnerable victims of negligence, Fort Myers personal injury lawyer Randall Spivey, says it is good that Florida is one of only six states that mandate that school buses have seatbelts.  However, even with the mandate, there is room for human error.  The seatbelt has to be used in order to be effective.  

The National Transportation Safety Board (“NTSB”) published its research of two school bus collisions to encourage other states to require seatbelts.The first occurred on February 16, 2012 in Chesterfield, N.J.  A school bus collided with a dump truck, killing 1 child, and injuring several more. The next month, in Port St. Lucie, Florida, a school bus failed to yield to a tractor trailer with a full load of sod, while transporting 30 students home from school. One child was killed. Both Florida and New Jersey state laws require seatbelts, so it was of particular interest to the NTSB to investigate the collisions. 

Doctors from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and University of Virginia used the surveillance footage from the buses to produce a frame-by-frame analysis for each of the 31 students on board and map what happened to their bodies.

The school bus was equipped with video monitoring, providing a rare first-hand perspective into the crash and its immediate aftermath. The doctors consulted the video recording and medical records of the injured children to understand the mechanisms of bodily injury from both a biomechanical and clinical perspective. In addition to the lap belts the children were wearing, school buses were designed with passive occupant protection in the form of compartmentalization – they were designed to protect children in front or rear crashes using energy-absorbent seat backs and narrow spacing.   However, in the subject collisions, the impact came from the side, which mitigated the protective effect of compartmentalization and resulted in numerous occupant injuries.

The doctors also knew which students wore seat belts and which did not. 

"It was very clear the more severely injured students had been unrestrained," said Dr. Mark Zonfrillo, one of the doctors from the Children's Hospital of Philadelphia who prepared the analysis for the NTSB. "And had had there been more unrestrained, they would have suffered more serious injuries."

If you or someone you know has been involved in an accident involving a school bus, contact the the Fort Myers personal injury lawyers at Spivey Law Firm, Personal Injury Attorneys, P.A..