Ohio Governor Mike DeWine and the Ohio School Bus Safety Working Group made 17 recommendations to school districts on how to improve bus safety. 

The biggest priority to DeWine was seat belts.

“The Ohio Department of Education and Workforce should work with the Ohio General Assembly to develop and fund a grant program to help school districts invest in school bus safety features such as, but not limited to, seat belts. The grant program should be needs-based,” one of the recommendations states.  

Currently, seat belts are optional to install on Ohio school buses that weigh over 10,000 pounds. 

DeWine is recommending that all schools have seat belts on their buses for students of all ages. The individual school districts will decide independently if they want to move forward with seat belts. DeWine was committed to helping schools with funding if they wanted to purchase new buses with seat belts or “retrofit” the buses that they currently have for seat belts. He said during the next state budget discussions, he will ask the General Assembly to include funding for seat belts but before that, DeWine said his office is working to put together some sort of funding that schools could access immediately.

Salem City School District currently has two buses with seat belts that the special education and preschool students ride in, and 18 other buses without seat belts. 

Jeff Martig, the Salem City Schools Transportation Supervisor, said they will consider getting seat belts for their buses but will have to do their own research first. 

“We’ve had incidents here, at Salem, that we’ve been fortunate not to have any type of injury or serious injury with the incidents we had but the buses are designed a certain way so that the kids are extremely safe in them,” Martig said. 

The research would look into the effectiveness of the design of the buses that the district has, statistics about past bus crashes and more to find the best fit. The Salem City School Board will then make the final decision based on the recommendations. But, the research could find that seat belts may not be the best fit for the district. 

“When you start talking about bus accidents in general, if a driver is injured who’s going to unbuckle 50 or 70 students in a bus?” Martig asked. 

Martig said the buses that currently have seat belts always have a duty aid supervisor to help if that situation would ever come up. 

“But if a bus, if it's in a pretty substantial accident, in order to evacuate it quickly and safely seat belts would be pretty hard,” Martig said.  

Governor DeWine’s recommendations come after one student was killed and 23 others were injured in a school bus accident on I-70 in Clark County back in August of 2023. The bus was struck by a Honda Odyssey that crossed the centerline, authorities said. The bus then went off the road and overturned, according to the preliminary investigation.

After that accident, Governor DeWine formed the Ohio School bus Safety Working Group. The group is made up of 15 members including parents, law enforcement and more. The group conducted research and spoke to experts on bus designs, crash risks and lessons learned from other school bus crashes. They then compiled a list of their 17 recommendations to present to schools across the state.  

“We know that the best way to protect our kids from being harmed in a crash is to prevent that crash from ever happening,” Andy Wilson, the Director of the Ohio Department of Public Safety said. 

Other recommendations made by DeWine and the group include enhanced lights on buses to make them more visible and to catch the attention of distracted drivers sooner, enhancing the penalty for traffic violations involving school buses and offering additional hours of training for drivers so they feel more comfortable behind the wheel. 

The full list of recommendations can be found here.