The school transportation industry likes to regularly regale itself with the truly extraordinary safety record of yellow buses.
Normally, numbers are just that. But when it comes to the lives of children, these figures literally breathe and pulse. That’s why a mere six children dying each year, on average, in school buses still horrifies school transporters, parents and media alike. Regardless, these deaths, plus the average of 14 or so that die outside of the school bus in the danger zone, are statistically the smallest blip on the radar when it comes to total U.S. crash fatalities that average in the 40,000 range per year. So sometimes it takes an incident like one that happened last week outside Seattle to remind us just how safe the yellow bus is.
According to the Seattle Times, a logging truck sideswiped a school bus, but none of the 28 high school and middle school students headed home for the weekend were seriously hurt. Perhaps it was because the logging truck wasn’t carrying a load, which likely would have added several hundred if not a thousand pounds of crash forces. Or, maybe because the school bus was slowing as it approached a stop.
Regardless, as a state trooper said, “This could have been much, much worse.”
I shudder to think what the result could have been if this same logging truck had hit a passenger car taking several students home. I doubt it would have ended with the same result. With every one these “near-miss” crashes, one is reminded just how safe school buses are. Then you consider how state budgets are affecting school bus operations. The American Association of School Administrators released a report just last week that shows that the 2010-2011 school year will be even more difficult financially than the previous two.
Then you really shudder to think.
