Back-to-School Turns Thoughts to Bus Safety

By F I R E SA F E T Y M AT T H E W Q U E E N

As the summer begins to wind down, the month of August signals the beginning of a new school year for many school districts around the Miami Valley.

Just this week, my oldest son, Brody, started back to school. Along with the new school year comes the arrival of the yellow buses transporting our children to and from school.

The first school bus was introduced in 1827 for a Quaker school in London, England. Drawn by horses, it could hold 25 children.

As technology has evolved, buses today can seat between 59 and 90 children.

They are yellow in color and have been so since 1939, when Dr. Frank W. Cyr, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University, organized a conference to establish construction standards for school buses.

This color of yellow was chosen because the black lettering on that hue of yellow was the easiest to see in the dark hours of the morning. Every year, at some point, children or school buses become involved in accidents. In the 1940s, many states had traffic laws on the books that regulated how children were picked up and dropped off.

In the 1960s, the first warning lights were used on school buses in Virginia.

Now, many school buses are equipped with wire or plastic arms which extend out from the front bumper of the bus. They make sure children, who have to cross the street, will not get caught in a bus’s blind spot and get injured.

In the United States, approximately two-thirds of students killed outside a school bus are not struck by other vehicles, but by their own bus.

There are also laws that govern how other motorists operate around school buses. The following is a summary of the Ohio Revised Code, section 4511.75 which relates to stopping for stopped school buses.

– The driver of a vehicle meeting or overtaking from either direction a school bus stopped for the purpose of receiving or discharging any school child shall stop at least 10 feet from the front or rear of the school bus and shall not proceed until such school bus resumes motion, or until signaled by the school bus driver to proceed.

– Every school bus shall be equipped with amber and red visual signals meeting the requirements of section 4511.771 of the Revised Code, and an automatically extended stop warning sign of a type approved by the state board of education, actuated by the driver of the bus whenever the bus is stopped or stopping on the roadway to pick up or let off children.

– Where a highway has four or more traffic lanes, a driver of a vehicle need not stop for a school bus approaching from the opposite direction which it has stopped for the purpose of receiving or discharging any school child.

– School buses operating on divided highways or on highways with four or more traffic lanes shall receive and discharge all school children on their residence side of the highway.

Remember, our children are our most prized possessions and their safety is paramount. Please take a few extra seconds to remember the laws that pertain to school buses and help keep our children safe.

Contact this columnist at (937) 433-4242 or mqueen@miamitownship. com.

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