Whenever you get in a car, it might be an automatic habit to put on your seatbelt before you go anywhere. When you ride the bus, however, the idea of having a seatbelt on might just sound weird to you. Whether you’re in a car or a school bus, getting in an accident is still possible, so shouldn’t school buses have seatbelts?

Nearly 1.5 million people die from road crashes every year. That is a big number and will only keep increasing unless we do something about it. Seatbelts were designed to reduce this amount by thousands, and they did. Seatbelts offer protection to any child or adult by if not preventing them from getting injured, making their injuries less severe. This will reduce the probability of death in a road crash. 25 million children get transported to and from school every year. With hundreds of thousands of school buses throughout the country, this mode of transportation has a lot of controversy on whether it’s safe enough for all these children. 

As of right now, 6 states, California, Louisiana, Florida, New Jersey, New York, and Texas, made it a state law that all school buses are required to have seatbelts. School buses are designed to be one of the safest vehicles on the road due to strict safety standards for transporting children. Not only are they heavily equipped with safety equipment, but they were also built in a way that reduces frontal and rear impacts. Although this was built to be safe, the large mass of the school bus can easily injure many children in the case of an accident. 

Riana Victoria, a Freshman here at Green Level says the following, “Yes, school buses should have seatbelts because they are more dangerous than cars, and if cars have seat belts, school buses should too. Especially the fact that school buses are very chaotic with kids wrestling each other and everything, so we need a way to make the kids safer.” More and more bus accidents are occurring, and so we need to decide whether more states should make seatbelts in school buses a requirement. 

As Manvi Sharma, another Freshman at Green Level states, “Although many kids in High School might not put on seatbelts, it’s still important to have them as an option. Especially with smaller kids like kids in Elementary school who if told so, will put their seatbelts on. It’s only fair if all kids are kept safe on their way to school and back home, and seatbelts will play a big factor in that.”

As you could tell from what some of our students think about this topic, you could see that seatbelts are an important way to keep kids safe from road crashes. They are already installed in cars, and can prevent thousands of deaths from car crashes every year. If they are so effective in keeping people safe in cars, will they be just as effective in buses?