We’ve all been there, most of us when we were little kids. The back of a school bus. We raced to get the back seats, or maybe the seats right over the wheels. We wanted the biggest launch when the bus hit a big bump. It’s fun when you’re a kid, until of course there is an accident.

We’ve come a long way in vehicle safety over the years. We’ve learned that it’s not better to be thrown from the vehicle in a crash. We’ve learned that some styles of seat belts work better than others, that shoulder harnesses keep us from putting our face into the windshield. In most places, we’ve created laws to prevent those darwin award winners among us from projecting themselves out the windshield in a minor fender bender. So why is it that we still load our kids into school buses without seat belts?

In the west end of Toronto today there was a minor crash involving a school bus that was carrying 27 grade 4 kids to a local conservation area. Somehow the bus hit the back of a flatbed truck, swerved into the median and bounced across the bumpy median. Really, from a vehicle standpoint it was a fairly minor crash. But, it’s not a normal vehicle, it’s a school bus full of kids. all those kids over the rear axle were likely slammed into the ceiling of the bus as it bounced across the grassy surface. Two kids are in critical condition, one of those is fighting for his life. He is ten years old. 13 others suffered a variety of more minor injuries. Likely all of them will suffer some sort of emotional aftershock that could last for years.

So why is it that these kids were hurt when the accident was so minor? Because our pathetic laws don’t require seat belts in school buses. The safety people point out that the seats have extra padding to protect kids in the event of a front or rear end collision. That’s great, but most of the time when you hear of a kid being hurt in a school bus it’s because they hit the roof. Of course there are the anti safety morons who say that they might burn to death if they couldn’t get their seat belt off in a fire. These are the same dupes who still refuse to wear seat belts themselves. Their kids, yours and mine shouldn’t have to pay for their stupidity. We are forced by law to make our kids use child booster seats in our own cars, yet the school boards transport literally hundreds of thousands of kids across North America each day who aren’t wearing seat belts.

It’s time to wake up and start installing some basic (in today’s world) safety equipment in school buses.

If you have any doubt, I’ve included a couple of videos I found on YouTube to give you a better idea. Put your thick skinned coat on, these aren’t pretty.

One more, this one is a bit more timely. Following a bus crash in February in Missouri, FOX news interviews government representative Sam Page who is campaigning to make seat belts mandatory in new school buses. This is a very relevant interview.