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Transportation Experts Warn: Biggest School Danger is When Students Don't Ride a School Bus |
SourceSchool Bus Information Council ForumsHealth, Safety, Nutrition and KidsRelated ArticlesLearning Partners -- Get To School Safely!Information and news releases furnished by the members of PR Newswire, who are responsible for their fact and content. |
WASHINGTON, Sept. 2, 1999 -- Leading national school
transportation
experts said today that recent high-profile incidents of violence in
schools
have rightly focused public attention on improving safety at U.S.
schools, but
the greatest risk to young people is not in the school itself, but how
they
are transported to and from it.
According to Mike Martin of the School Bus Information Council (SBIC), more and more children are abandoning the traditional yellow school bus to ride with parents or friends, walk or bicycle, all of which involve much greater risk. "As children begin the 1999-2000 school year, parents should consider the full range of school safety concerns. Many may be surprised to learn that by a huge margin the greatest threat of harm to their children is not violent incidents or weapons at school, but their choice of transportation," Martin said. A recent national survey conducted for the SBIC by Wirthlin Worldwide, found that about one-third of American adults believe incorrectly that driving their children to school is the safest way to get them there. When survey respondents were told that school buses are the safest way to transport children and local school transportation funding is declining, they ranked pupil transportation the number one school priority, even over such popular issues as teacher salaries, repairing buildings, textbooks and other activities. Ricardo Martinez, MD, an emergency physician and Administrator of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), said school buses have an impressive record of transporting children safely. For school-aged children, riding in a large yellow school bus is safer than a passenger vehicle by a factor of 60-1. "These odds should be a wake-up call for parents and make them think twice before driving their children to school or allowing teenagers to drive to school unnecessarily." According to NHTSA, between 1987 and 1997 an average of 11 children died each year as passengers in school buses while traveling to or from school or a school-related activity, typically in a serious, non-survivable crash. During the same period, an average of 600 school-age children were killed in passenger vehicles during normal school hours (6 a.m. to 9 a.m. and 2 p.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday, September 1 through June 15). |
