New Texas law requiring seatbelts on all school buses.

@Pinehurst : If...If....If....That's what me and some friends say all the time about the lottery....IF we win, what would we do....Fact of the matter is there's decades of "statistics" on school bus safety and "accidents"....If there was a "serious concern", seat belts would have been implemented long ago....

Maybe we should also go with a law forcing busses to have hardened steel roofs too.....*IF* a meteorite should strike a bus it could penetrate the regular steel roofs and possibly kill Jack or Jill!....

Occasionally I was recruited to drive a school bus. If the students were taught and learned to follow directions and respect authority by parents/guardians,teachers and principals, I had no real problems; especially when I told them I didn't want to see them hurt or in the hospital or have to call their parents. If there was a problem, I would just wait till all students were following my directions before I moved the bus. Usually it took less than 5 min for all students to comply.

I'd rather see them do random drug and alcohol testing.

@AMCLady :
Why let them on if they do not go to the rules and the let it be

@ladybeachbum when I worked
for HumbleISD, they were pretty lenient with discipline. All kinds of awful things happened on those buses. I don't know how those bus drivers put up with it. I'm talking about some of the high school kids. Not all the kids. Also parents demanded it because they had no other way to get their precious ones to school. I can remember when they started putting video tapes in the buses to record some of the activities that were going on. One of the drivers was actually kicked in the head by one of the special needs students. That student was removed from the school. At the elementary level, the drivers would just stop the bus and not go until the kids finally calmed down. Otherwise, they couldn't safely drive.

@susanbanthony : The massive state budget surplus should have been tapped to cover the costs

@ladybeachbum :
As I remember, the district was afraid of the parents and their complaining. Our complaints were unheard. I rode on the short buses many times and I heard many complaints from the bus drivers about what they have to deal with everyday. I remember years ago when I was still working had an elementary school, there was a fifth grade girl who was extremely unruly on the buses. One day she took a project that a student was bringing to school and tore up to pieces. That was caught on tape and she was finally sent to another school for discipline. It really takes some horrible incident for the district to act.

@Olaf I was thinking the same thing. Most school districts in Texas cannot afford seat belts in every school bus. Sounds like a rainy day to me. 🤷