School hasn't even started yet, and already, ten children have been injured and were taken to the hospital after two school busses collided on Tuesday. This crash combined stupid on top of stupid, which is exactly why we need 3-point seat belts on school busses.
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Two school busses from a summer program at Lake Louise Elementary School in Palatine, Illinois, collided even before they got out of the driveway. The school is located a half mile north of Palatine Road and a half mile west of Illinois Route 53 in Palatine, Illinois. That's in northwest Cook County, about 25 miles northwest of downtown Chicago. The 65-year-old driver of one of the busses didn't want to stretch to reach the gas pedal, so he strapped a wooden block precariously to the pedal, which is a pretty stupid, reckless thing to do. Apparently, the block slipped to the left side, towards the brake pedal. The bus took off to start the route, but the driver tried to stop before the end of the driveway because there was another bus in front of it. When the driver stepped on the brake pedal, that pedal came in contact with the wooden block and pushed the gas pedal down, too, causing the bus to accelerate, rather than slow down, and slam into the bus in front of it.
In order to obtain accurate information for this report, I stopped by the school at about 8:30 on Wednesday morning, went directly to the office and asked the principal if the bus had seat belts and if the kids were wearing them. The principal declined to answer and politely referred me to a spokesman at the school district administrative office. It shouldn't have been that difficult for her to answer the question of whether or not there were seat belts on the bus, but she declined, just the same.
I noticed that the fleet of busses had just arrived with the kids when I was about to exit the school. Since I had to walk past the busses to get to the parking lot where my car was located, I waited inside the school until all the kids had gotten off the bus and had lined up by the front door of the school. That way, the kids would not have to walk past a stranger to get to the front door of the school.
After the kids got off the busses and lined up at the front door of the school, I left the building and walked towards the parking lot, not saying a word to the kids. Just as I was about to walk past the last of the busses in the driveway, the driver stepped off the bus. She smiled at me and said, "Hello." She was really nice. I looked in the open door of the bus and saw lap belts on the front row of seats. I asked the driver whether the seat belts were in just the front row or in all rows, and whether any of the seats had shoulder restraints. She cheerfully replied that every row of all of the district-owned busses had lap belts, but none had shoulder restraints. I thanked her and resumed walking to my car. Just then, I noticed that the principal was rushing over to where the bus driver and I had been speaking.
Oops! Too late! The big State Secret about whether the bus had seat belts had been revealed. Perhaps the driver will be fired for being honest with a concerned parent.
When I got back to my car, I called the district spokesman from my cell phone. When the receptionist found out why I was calling, the district spokesman suddenly was busy in a meeting and wouldn't be able to come to the phone. That, however, wasn't about to stop Mr. Persistence from obtaining the truth about whether all of the kids were actually wearing their seat belts.
I next drove over to the nearest fire station to speak to the incident commander who handled the crash to see if he knew anything about the seat belt usage by the kids. The ranking officer, there, was very nice. He referred me to the other area fire station, where the deputy chief who responded was located.
I drove to the other fire station. The deputy chief was also very nice, but he explained that the job of the fire department was to rescue the injured children. The police department was the agency that does the investigation and writes the report about the type of matter that I was interested in. He referred me to a spokesman at police headquarters.
I drove to the police station. The spokesman, there, was also very nice. He promptly made me a copy of the three-page accident report, plus a copy of the code sheet. The accident report, among other things, lists the names, ages and vehicle numbers of all passengers. In addition, there is are several codes next to each passenger name.
The first code is "SAFT," to indicate safety equipment used by the passenger. Code 1 is None Present. Code 2 is Seat Belt Used. Code 3 is Seat Belt Not Used. Codes 4 and 5 refer to helmet use and Codes 6-8 refer to Child Restraint usage.
The next code is "AIR," to indicate whether an air bag was present and whether it deployed.
The next code is "EJCT," to indicate whether a passenger was totally or partially ejected and whether there was entrapment or extrication.
The last code is "INJ," to indicate injury classification. K is Fatal (killed). A is Incapacitating Injury. B is Non-incapacitating. C is Reported, Not Evident. 0 is No Indication of Injury.
Palatine Police Department official Accident Report # 01-17468 revealed that there were seventeen young children, between the ages of six and eleven, on the bus that crashed. Unfortunately, combining stupid on top of stupid, the driver was more concerned about whether his wooden block was strapped to the accelerator than he was about whether the young-and-dumb kids were strapped to their seats. According to the police report, not one single kid, on either bus, was wearing a seat belt. Every single kid on both busses was a Code 3 under SAFT.
Even though the bus had traveled all of thirty feet and hadn't even left the driveway yet, more than half of the kids on the bus were injured so severely from not wearing their seat belts that they were transported by a fleet of about five ambulances to area hospitals. At least one child suffered an injury that left the child bleeding from the head.
No wonder the principal was doing everything she could to conceal the truth and divert away my inquiry. Either the school doesn't have a policy requiring the kids to use their seat belts, or the drivers and school administrators are being lazy about safety and ignoring the policy. The principal is the number one person responsible for the safety of the kids from her school. If none of the kids on either bus are wearing their seat belts, then the principal simply isn't getting the job done of making sure that the safety rules for her school are being followed by her subordinates.
The principal certainly demonstrated her ability to move quickly when it came to guarding the truth from being revealed to me. Maybe she could put the same effort into guarding the kids from being exposed to danger by getting off her butt, with the same urgency as when I was there, to check and make sure that the kids have their seat belts on each day before the busses leave the driveway. The principal showed that she can get out there in a big hurry when it is important to her, such as when it's time to cover up her failure to ensure that basic rules of safety are being followed. Now she needs to show the same aggressiveness in protecting the kids' safety as she does for concealing the truth. If she does that, she won't have to worry about protecting the busses from me.
Rob Sherman P. O. Box
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