Following crash, bill would enhance data on school bus safety

AUSTIN – The Austin American-Statesman reports that almost 19 years ago, Brad Brown’s daughter, Ashley, was a West Brook High School soccer player bound for a playoff game in Houston when the bus carrying the team flipped over. Ashley was one of two Beaumont students who died in the March 29, 2006, crash. The bus they were riding on didn’t have seat belts. “No one on that bus escaped without life-changing wounds,” Brown said. Brown has spent the past nearly 20 years advocating for safer student transportation, including for school buses to have seat belts. Brown, who hopes a newly proposed bill will help achieve that goal, traveled to the Texas Capitol on Wednesday to voice support for Senate Bill 546.

The bill would tighten the state’s exemptions for installing seat belts on school buses and, for the first time, mandate widespread reporting about the presence of restraints in Texas’ school bus fleet. Sen. Jose´ Mene´ndez, D-San Antonio, who authored the legislation, presented the bill to the Senate Committee on Transportation almost exactly a year after a deadly Bastrop County crash involving a school bus. The March 22, 2024, accident resulted in the deaths of a prekindergarten student and a 33-year-old man when a concrete pump truck collided with a Hays school district bus. The bus was carrying 44 Tom Green Elementary School students returning from a field trip to the Capital of Texas Zoo in Bastrop County. The Bastrop County crash was “horrific,” Mene´ndez said. “Because of tragedies like this and others, the state’s been working to increase school bus safety for almost 20 years.” A 2017 law already requires all school buses to have seat belts but excludes buses purchased before 2017. The law also allows districts to exempt themselves from the mandate if they can’t financially support the purchase of new buses.