Palm Beach County, FLA School Bus Driver

[Slipknot]

Runs a stop sign and colides with a pickup truck. The bus rolls several times. No seat-belts used, according to students on board. Few are injured. One 15-year-old girl is killed. Here's the kicker: It happend on Veteran's Day. There was supposed to be no school. Palm Beach County's School Board decided it would be a good idea to use Veteran's Day as a make-up day. This could have been avoided by taking a day off of winter or summer break... :fork: :fork: :fork:

This is the second time in less than a decade that a school bus driver runs a stop sign and colides with another vehicle and kills a child in Palm Beach County.

 

[Gregory]

Runs a stop sign and colides with a pickup truck. The bus rolls several times. No seat-belts used, according to students on board. Few are injured. One 15-year-old girl is killed. Here's the kicker: It happend on Veteran's Day. There was supposed to be no school. Palm Beach County's School Board decided it would be a good idea to use Veteran's Day as a make-up day. This could have been avoided by taking a day off of winter or summer break... :fork: :fork: :fork:

This is the second time in less than a decade that a school bus driver runs a stop sign and colides with another vehicle and kills a child in Palm Beach County.

Wow.. thats really sad.. Too bad they didn't just take the day off...

 

[cru5h]

There are no seat belts on the buses, at all. I'm not sure why. I was injured on a bus as a kid because of that (I've gone to school in Palm Beach County my whole life).

Unfortunately Palm Beach County was hit by 2 hurricanes in a 3 week span of time, causing the children to miss 14 days of school in which 12 are to be made up and the parents all voted for this set-up. We were given 2 options and this one was chosen by a landslide. Let's face the facts: It would have all been avoided had the bus driver stopped at the stop sign like she was supposed to, point blank. It doesn't matter what day it was. She's had other traffic infractions before but they don't say whether or not it was while she was driving a bus or if it was her own personal vehicle.

I'd be a little more worried about the amount of school shootings Palm Beach County has had in the last decade and the fact that 1 made national headlines when a boy shot and killed his teacher. I'm a little concerned with the amount of convicted killers that graduated (or didn't graduate) from my high school around the same time I did. I'm even more concerned that I can't drive down Palm Beach Lakes Blvd. because every night for over a week someone's been shot and killed on the same stretch of road. This is a warped area of the country, there is no doubt about that. Something in the water...maybe it's the heat.

 

[Number_6]

Question about the school buses in Florida... what's with the blinking white lights on top of the buses here? I never saw that in Massachusetts.

 

[tigsmom]

Question about the school buses in Florida... what's with the blinking white lights on top of the buses here? I never saw that in Massachusetts.

We have them here in NY too...they're for saftey, makes them easier to see in bad weather. We got them last year. We've had bus accidents too(many places do), but thankfully only one was deadly, though many were injured that day. We have seatbelts on our buses and the kids are encouraged to us them, but most do not.

What worries me more are the many people who speed past stopped buses endangering the lives of the kids. Those flashing red lights are there for a reason...STOP and give the kids a chance.

 

[NemoRocks78]

This could have been avoided by taking a day off of winter or summer break... :fork: :fork: :fork:

And that they should have done.

A friend of mine goes to the school the girl who tragedly died attended and knew her.....a sad story indeed.

 

[Not For Sale]

I don't ever remember using a sea belt on my school bus except for one time: When the police came to take a kid off of the bus for doing something I don't recall.

 

[Figment1986]

Pasco School Buses purchased this year.. (05 models) have seatbelts on them. the reason most bosses dont ahev them was they didn't think of rollovers when designing them.. They would have figured everything else was purfect.. even when the escape hatch on top was added...

This is sad and might motivate FLA to give more money to school districts to modify or fastrack new fleets to get seat belts... (and posibly air condtioning too... :lookaroun )

 

[WDWScottieBoy]

That's a really sad story.

We have the blinking white lights on top of buses here in IL because of bad weather, fog and whatnot.

I was told while in school that we didn't have seat belts because they didn't think we could use them. They were afraid that if the bus caught on fire we'd panic too much and wouldn't be able to get off the bus.

 

[Slipknot]

I was told while in school that we didn't have seat belts because they didn't think we could use them. They were afraid that if the bus caught on fire we'd panic too much and wouldn't be able to get off the bus.

How stupid do they think you are???? That's as dumb as the school board directer getting a huge bonus when that money could go to the schools themselves (again, Palm Beach County).

 

[WDWScottieBoy]

How stupid do they think you are???? That's as dumb as the school board directer getting a huge bonus when that money could go to the schools themselves (again, Palm Beach County).

Apparently they don't teach us anything in elementary school, safety being number 1 right? :brick: I couldn't stand it, they put a couple seat belts in eventually in the first two seats only because kids would run around and they needed to control them. The first thing I do when I get in my car is put my seatbelt on, nothing comes first besides that.

Why can't the be concerned about our safety like they say they are and just put seatbelts on every vehicle. If you don't know how to get in and/or out of one, well then don't ride the bus because that's just sad.

 

[Tramp]

A few years back, I sat on a local school board committee to study the use of seatbelts on school buses. Seatbelts are required on most small school buses but not on the large buses.

In most communities, it boils down to a cost vs. benefit analysis.

Modern school buses are compartmentalized with high back seats and thick cushions to absorb impacts in the event of a crash. Seatbelted children would hang from the ceiling in the event of a rollover causing additional injuries or death and an inability to exit the bus. Each seat requires three sets of belts which require color coding to avoid confusion. Children use seatbelts as weapons. Children tie the belts together before leaving the bus so the next group has difficulty hooking up. Children cut the belts rendering it useless. Then there's the legal question as to whether or not a driver can move a bus before a student is buckled in and what happens if a belt is not available for a student for one reason or another. You can imagine the monumental traffic delays and extension of route time.

School buses weigh 10 tons and absorb impacts well and are seldom involved in a crash in which seatbelts would make a difference to injuries. Children sit well above the impact area for the majority of bus accidents. Very few kids are killed inside a bus. Out of almost 25 million kids who take school buses, approx 25 are killed in school bus related accidents every year and most are killed by their own bus, passing motorists or as pedestrians going to or standing at the bus. There are tons of stats showing the deaths of school children in non-school bus related accidents far exceeding this number. School bus transportation is the safest mode of transportation in the world.

Most of the communities with seat belts will quietly admit that they've caved into the pressures of a population that didn't take the time to study the facts and to avoid negligent lawsuits for even the slightest accidents. Yet, insurance studies have shown that seatbelts on buses do not deter lawsuits. The communities I spoke to do not require children to wear the belts and openly admit the kids do not buckle up. Removing the belts is virtually impossible now and would be political suicide.

Seatbelts cost an average of about $50 per seating position to the price of a new bus. Most large buses carry at least 60 kids...that's $3,000 per bus. In a modest community with 50 buses, either Town-owned or contracted, $150,000 every 5 years or so is a big chunk of change. As part of the contracts, repair costs are always passed onto the Community if students damage the belts.

Anytime these arguments are made, someone always counters with the argument that it's worth it if it saves even one life. And that's an argument that a person can't disagree with even if a child is 2000 times safer travelling in a school bus than in the family car.

Oh, crap...that's a speech and a half! :zipit:

 

[TAC]

There was supposed to be no school. Palm Beach County's School Board decided it would be a good idea to use Veteran's Day as a make-up day. This could have been avoided by taking a day off of winter or summer break... :fork: :fork: :fork:

While I wholeheartedly agree that this is a tragedy, I have to disagree that "it could have been avoided by taking a different day off."

If the school board had kept school closed on Veteran's Day and had indeed taken shortened the winter or summer break, and the same accident had occurred, wouldn't many people have said the exact opposite? "Why didn't they just have school on November 11th?"

Bottom line, no one could have predicted that the accident would have happened.

:wave: