Today is a day to remember that Malloy and the Legislature STOLE Connecticut’s school seat belt money!
From today’s Chattanooga Times Free Pres, 6 students in ICU after school bus driver charged in crash that killed Woodmore Elementary students,
Five students are confirmed dead in the Woodmore Elementary School bus crash and six remain in critical condition this morning.Three of the students killed were in fourth grade, one was in first grade and another in kindergarten, according to Hamilton County Schools Interim Superintendent Kirk Kelly.
Descriptions from the crash scene appear to confirm that the death and injury toll would have been significantly reduced if children were wearing seat belts. However, in Tennessee only school buses transporting special education students are required to have seats belts.
By comparison, school buses in California, Florida, Louisiana, New Jersey and New York must be equipped with seat belts and Texas requires that all school buses purchased after 2010 must be fitted with seat belts.
As Tennessee newspapers are now reporting, State Representative Joe Armstrong, D-Knoxville, “led an unsuccessful effort to require seat belts on Tennessee school buses last year after two students and a teacher’s aide died in a bus crash in Knoxville. Many lawmakers opposed the proposal, saying it was too expensive.”
But seat belts work…
According to a 2010 study conducted by the University of Alabama, seat belts work. The three year tracking study found,
- Students are six to eight times safer riding to school in a school bus than riding to school in their parents’ cars.
- The addition of seat belts would make already-safe school buses even safer.
- Based on 170,000 observations of pupils in pilot-project buses, the average seat belt- use rate was 61.5%.
- Adding seat belts increases the thickness of seat-backs, leading to fewer rows of seats.
School bus seat belts might have made a huge difference in yesterday’s fatal school bus Today is a day to remember that Malloy and the Legislature STOLE Connecticut’s school seat belt money! - Wait What?: