Seat belts often are thought of as a safety measure, but Franklin schools are considering adding lap-shoulder belts to school buses to also help curb behavioral issues among students.
A bus with lap-shoulder belts arrived in January, and will be tested for effectiveness as a pilot bus starting later this month, pending inspection by the Indiana State Police.
Franklin schools Director of Transportation Doug Dickinson pointed to Clark-Pleasant as one example of a district that has seen student behavior improve with the addition of lap-shoulder belts. Special education buses are already equipped with lap-shoulder belts.
“I’ve heard a lot of praise on them from local (school) corporations that have used them so I’m pretty excited to run a pilot and see the same improvements with discipline and safety ourselves,” Dickinson said. “With other districts I’ve talked to, the change is almost instantly. They talk about a 90 to 95 percent improvement in bus discipline.”
With students more well-behaved, drivers can also focus on the road and not on student discipline, Dickinson said.
If the district were to add lap-shoulder belts to buses after the pilot bus is tested, the total cost would be about $6,500 per bus, Dickinson said. The money would come out of the district’s transportation budget. If the lap-shoulder belts are successful in the pilot bus, more buses with the belts could be ordered for use in the fall.
In terms of safety, students are much more likely to get in an accident if they are driven to school in cars than if they are in a school bus, Dickinson said, although he noted some school bus drivers worry that in the case of a school bus accident, it would be harder to get students out if they are wearing a lap-shoulder belt.
At Clark-Pleasant schools, lap-shoulder belts have been in use since the district added started adding them three years ago, Transportation Director Bob Downin said. He said when he worked at Bartholomew County schools in 2009, the district was one of the first in the state to add the belts, which he said improved student behavior by 80 percent. Lap-shoulder belts also provide protection from side-impact crashes, as without the belts, students have virtually no protection compared to if the bus is hit from the back or front, he said.
The district currently has more than 20 buses with lap-shoulder belts in its fleet of 70, with another seven on the way, Downin said.
Both Center Grove and Greenwood do not use seat belts, lap-shoulder or otherwise, on their regular education school buses, although the Greenwood district has discussed adding them in the past, Greenwood Operations Director Mike Hildebrand said. The difficulty of enforcement, as well as the current level of safety on the district’s school buses, however, have deterred the district from investing in them thus far, he said.
“One concern is, who checks the seat to see if the seatbelt is on?” Hildebrand said. “There’s no way to police that unless another adult is on the bus. Once you look at them, they might take it right back off.”
