AVON LAKE, Ohio — On Tuesday, a school bus crash left one student dead and more than 20 others injured in Clark County, Ohio. The crash has sparked renewed conversation surrounding the safety of school transportation vehicles, with officials saying the school bus involved did not have seatbelts.
Ohio does not require seat belts in its school buses. According to the National Transportation Safety Board, less than 10 states in the country require seat belts on school buses.
According to the Ohio State Highway Patrol, from 2018 to the end of July, 2023, there were 6,089 traffic crashes involving school buses in the state, in which 1,847 people were injured, and seven people were killed. The State Highway Patrol noting that none of the people killed were on a school bus.
However, that changed on Tuesday, when a minivan hit the school bus, causing it to veer off the road.
“It is a parent and a grandparent’s absolute worst nightmare,” said Gov. Mike DeWine on Wednesday.
While in Euclid on Wednesday, DeWine emphasized how safe school buses are, despite this tragedy. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, less than 1% of traffic death involve kids on school transportation vehicles.
“Because of this tragedy, I think we all are sort of looking at this and saying, ‘what else can we do?’” DeWine said.
As a result, DeWine said he and the general assembly will put together a group to look into school bus safety, which will then bring recommendations to the general assembly.
“They make come back and say, ‘look, we’re doing fine.’ But my experience in life is you can always do better, and there’s always things maybe you’re missing,” he said. “So let’s take a look at this again, let’s take this tragedy, as horrible as it is, and use that as the push to look at – are there other things we can do to make our transportation system of our buses safer?”
Rudy Breglia of Avon Lake is the president of the School Bus Safety Alliance. He works to advocate for seat belts in school buses, aiming to prompt action from school boards, and help acquire funds to support pilot programs for districts to get school buses with seatbelts.
“The laws of physics apply to you if you're not restrained in a bus,” Breglia said. “You're going at the same speed as the bus is going, and if the bus stops short or there's a crash, you'll fly forward and hit the seat back in front of you."
Breglia said some reasons he’s heard from districts as to why they did not get school buses with seat belts had to do with cost, liability concerns, and concerns over kids being able to fully use the seat belts.
3News spoke with Joelle Magyar, the superintendent of the Avon Lake City School District, who said the district did at one point participate in a pilot program, adding two buses with seat belts to their fleet.
However, Magyar said they ran into some challenges. For example, she said each bus seat can fit three students, however, you could only realistically fit two students buckled up on the seats when using the seat belts. Additionally, she said some of the younger kids had trouble getting out of their seat belts, requiring the driver to stop the bus to assist.
Ultimately, she said the pilot program was canceled.
However, Breglia is undeterred, still hoping to add more seat belts to school buses, calling seat belts a “standard of care.”
“We have more than 55 years of experience with seatbelts since 1968, and seatbelts have saved millions of lives worldwide,” he said. “It’s about time for us to bite the bullet and go ahead and start putting seatbelts in our school buses.”
Meanwhile, the Ohio State Highway Patrol says that the driver of a minivan involved in the crash with the Clark County elementary school bus was arrested on Wednesday. Hermanio Joseph, 35, was taken into custody and charged with aggravated vehicular homicide. The charge is a fourth degree felony due to Joseph reportedly driving without a valid license, Clark County Municipal Court records say.