If they are one of the 25 million children who ride a school bus everyday, they are 13 times safer than children using other means of transportation to school. On average 617 children and teens die in auto accidents, 131 die walking and 46 bicycle riders die on their way to and from school.
This is National School Bus Safety Week and it is used to promote those facts. This year National Association for Pupil Transportation (NAPT) has the support of the U.S. House of Representatives “supporting the goals and ideals of National School Bus Safety Week. ”
The slogan for this year is “Avoid Harm. Obey the Stop Arm.”
The reason for the safety week is to focus on the fact that according to the NAPT –
There is no safer way to transport a child than in a school bus. Fatal crashes involving school bus occupants are rare events, even though school buses serve daily in every community. Every school day, some 475,000 yellow school buses transport more than 25 million children to and from schools and school-related activities.
Officials want more parents to realize that there is no safer form of transportation for your child getting to and from school. Drving them yourself or allowing them to ride with teenager is not the safer solution. Most of the 800 children who die each year walking, biking or riding in a car to school would be alive if they had been on a school bus.
The national school bus transportation system makes approximately 10 billion trips to and from school or field trips each year. It by far exceeds any other mass transit system in the country and it remains one of the safest.
Every day there are more than 25 million children are making that trip to school the safest way possible, shouldn’t your child be one of them?