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About the School Bus Incident Epidemic


The school bus system is a big part of the "public school experience". Photos of children entering the school bus on their first day of school are an image of a right of passage for many families. And if we didn't have a bus system, it would be logistically impossible to move so many kids to school and back each day. You can't have hundreds or thousands of kids arriving independently at different times and funneling into and out of a single road each and every day: there would be chaos. Have you ever stopped to think about important the bus system is for the public school system? Schools wouldn't be able to operate without a bussing system.


Yet the system we rely on so completely is also one we should trust the least. School bus incidents now seem to make headlines with unsettling regularity: in Maine last month a child was hit by his school bus; in Arkansas, a bus driver assaulted a student; and in Seattle, Washington a school bus crashed, injuring 11 students --- and these are just a few examples from the last month. These incidents are not a rare occurrence: they have been happening regularly for many years. They reflect a pattern of preventable risks—on-board violence, unsafe conditions, and tragedies on the road—playing out again and again while budgets grow and accountability lags. And when a driver is responsible for navigating traffic in a vehicle full of children, how can they possibly monitor what’s happening in the back rows? They can’t. These problems aren’t “fringe” exceptions; they are predictable outcomes of a strained, outdated system—and they demand the attention we’ve been postponing.


This needs to be stopped!


In this article we review the dangers of the public school bus system; but more to the point, we show that this system is unfixable and that it is just another example of how broken the public school system. There is simply no way that any school district could provide the necessary resources -- in the form of money, training, and personnel -- to provide a safe, secure, and reliably bus system: “More training,” “More oversight”, “More funding,” these are not solutions: they are feel-good slogans. The deeper and more relevant question is whether this model can actually be made safe and reliable at scale. Because the fixes most people would propose—more adult monitors, better pay to attract and retain skilled drivers, better screening and supervision, more cameras, faster incident response—are expensive, labor-intensive, and difficult to sustain across an entire district year after year. Even districts with rising budgets struggle to hire enough staff and maintain consistent standards. Meanwhile, the risks continue.


Enough is enough!


This isn’t about one bad driver or one tragic crash. It’s about a system designed with built-in vulnerabilities—vulnerabilities that predictably surface again and again. In this article, we’ll provide many examples of the dangers of the public school bus system and argue that the problem isn’t a lack of concern or a lack of good intentions. The problem is that the model itself is fundamentally strained: it asks too few people to do too much, under conditions that cannot reliably be controlled. And that reality deserves a serious public reckoning—not another round of talking points.


School bus drivers are getting arrested





School bus accidents are happening too often!


The school bus is a recipe for disaster. They can't be easy to maneuver on the road. The school bus probably has more blind spots than a typical vehicle. Drivers probably have to drive and focus on traffic with potentially extra distractions from students causing havoc in the seats behind them. They might make careless mistakes if they are on a tight schedule. There are no seatbelts.


From 2014 to 2023 there were 971 fatal school-transportation-related traffic crashes, and 1,079 people of all ages were killed in those crashes, averaging 108 fatalities per year.






There have been many children struck by a school bus.


Unattended children around cars and busses is a recipe for disaster. Was there a parent or other attentive adult holding the child's hand to make sure they crossed safely? Or entered and exited the bus safely. Do parents teach their children pedestrian rules of the road including right of way laws? Can these safety mechanisms be applied 100% of the time? No, of course not.


The news article suggests that the driver is not getting charged. The driver likely had the right of way. Please teach your children to cross the street safely.


This is another one "Police haven't said if the school bus driver will face any charges."


"no criminal charges have been made and it is unclear if any will be." (src)



School bus violence has been normalized


The school bus looks like "The Lord of the flies".


The school bus is a situation set up to fail. There is one driver who must focus on traffic in a large moving box with 20 to 50 other kids, most of whom are hidden from view. There is no adult to student safety ratio like there would be in virtually any other situation where children are in the care of a caretaker other than their parent. And there are no other adults in the bus assigned to manage the potentially dangerous or illegal activities of the minor passengers.


What if a child does not follow the rules? What if they are being disruptive or distracting the driver? Can the school or driver expel them from using the school bus? Are there any true consequences of bullying or not following the rules of the bus? Probably not. This is another example of public school forced association Russian roulette. Violence and other incidents are an expected outcome to the situation set up to fail. Here are some examples:




Other incidents




The Responsibility Falls on Parents


Public school buses are treated like a solved problem: a yellow vehicle arrives, children get in, and the system keeps moving. But the steady drumbeat of crashes, assaults, bullying, and preventable chaos shows that “moving kids” is not the same as keeping them safe. Even when buses are engineered to protect passengers in a collision, the daily reality is a rolling environment with built-in supervision gaps, inconsistent discipline, and staffing pressures that no slogan (“more training,” “more oversight,” “more funding”) can reliably fix at scale.


If we’re serious about child safety, we need to stop pretending that this model is automatically acceptable just because it’s traditional. Families deserve honest transparency about risk, clear accountability when incidents occur, and, most importantly, real choice. For many parents that will mean opting out—arranging transportation directly, coordinating carpools, hiring help, or using other alternatives—because the first responsibility for a child’s safety belongs with the adults who know them and can supervise them. The school-bus “incident epidemic” isn’t a string of freak exceptions; it’s a predictable outcome of a strained system. It’s time to acknowledge that reality and act accordingly.



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