There are two issues that arise from time to time in B.C. school districts and are guaranteed to fill an auditorium with concerned, even angry, parents.
School closures is one, and changes in the student transportation system, including the imposition of bus fees or the cancellation of school-bus routes, is the other.
But new information about student safety on school buses is likely to eclipse the other two and we’ll get to that.
Across the province, school boards have cancelled bus services while others are planning to reduce them or raise fees for families who use them, all in an attempt to balance budgets that have become increasingly stretched.
Imposing bus fees as a contribution to balancing the budget is a nightmare decision.
Parents who simply refuse to pay know two things for sure: The district will not abandon children at a bus stop and, second, the district has no legal mechanism to force payment.
To make matters worse, while there is some recognition in the funding formula for transportation, nothing in the School Act compels school districts to provide transportation for students.
If there were any redeeming logic for districts to hang in there and continue to provide transportation, that logic might have been refuted by Transport Canada recently.
Until then, those of us who lost sleep over the years worrying about kids waiting for the school bus at icy bus stops or on snow days had sought reassurance and placed our faith in a December 2007 Transport Canada report that said school buses continue to be one of the safest methods of travel for children and youth.
While there were winter dangers at the roadside bus stops, once the kids got onto the bus, they were comparatively safe.
In the 10 years 1997-2007, Transport Canada reports that only 0.3 per cent of all collisions resulting in personal injury or death involved school buses. Yet during that time, Canadian children travelled by bus as many as six billion times, an estimated 600 million pupil-trips per year and 3.4 million pupil-trips each day.
Impressive statistics, and the other reassuring conclusion reached and widely circulated by Transport Canada and which, at the time, seemed to make sense, was that seatbelts were not necessary on a school bus and, in fact, could cause serious whiplash injuries if kids were thrown forward from the waist belt into the seat ahead of them.
Reassuring, that is, until a four-month CBC investigation, broadcast in October, uncovered a previously unreleased 2010 report in which Transport Canada’s “chief of crashworthiness research” (I kid you not) said seatbelts are “a good first step” toward improving school-bus safety.
That study says seatbelts could help prevent injuries in rollovers or crashes in which a pickup truck or larger vehicle slammed into the side of a bus, or crashes causing “significant vertical lift of the occupant compartment.”
The study, which also showed that high-backed, padded seats on school buses did nothing to help children in side-impact and rollover crashes, was marked “internal research report” and was not posted on Transport Canada’s website or otherwise made available to the public until The Fifth Estate asked for it in September.
Suzanne Tylko wrote the 50-page internal report, which contains photos, graphs and other crash data, and came to conclusions that differ greatly from a 1984 Transport Canada study that said belts could be harmful to students.
Tylko, who is chief of Transport Canada’s testing facilities in Blainville, Que., said she did not know why her report was not released publicly and it was not her decision to make.
Her study also recommended further research on the use of seatbelts on buses to ensure that their use didn’t increase the risk of injury for children.
So much for being reassured.
In 2016, after years of frustration among rural school districts, the B.C. government committed $14.7 million to make riding the school bus more affordable and accessible for students.
The problem now for B.C. is that it is up to each province to create and then enforce legislation requiring seatbelts in school buses should they deem it necessary.
Equipping one bus with seatbelts could cost more than $10,000 and there are, according to an Education Ministry report, about 1,200 school buses in B.C.
But as one oft-quoted anonymous philosopher said: “As soon as you see a mistake and don’t fix it, it becomes your mistake.”
Geoff Johnson is a former superintendent of schools.
