With New Tools and Tougher Laws, School Bus Rides Get Safer

With New Tools and Tougher Laws, School Bus Rides Get Safer

States are enhancing safety with stop-arm cameras, seat belt requirements and more driver training.

Thirty states now have school bus stop-arm camera laws, with Colorado, Nevada and South Dakota joining the list in 2025. (SDI Productions/Getty Images)

Nearly 210 children-about half the enrollment of a typical elementary school-died in school transportation-related crashes in the U.S. from 2014 to 2023.

And 171 of the deaths actually took place outside the bus: The kids were walking nearby, boarding or deboarding. Half of them were 5 to 10 years old.

Those sobering statistics drive home the need for a stronger focus on ending the illegal passing of stopped school buses, Kristin Rosenthal, senior highway safety specialist for the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, or NHTSA, told a session at the 2025 NCSL Base Camp policy meeting.

"It's really a pedestrian issue," she says. "The school bus is the safest way for kids to get to school. Once they're on the bus, they're good to go. It's really loading and unloading of that bus that they're in danger from people illegally passing stop arms and red lights flashing on school buses."

It is also a huge driver issue.

Consider the results of this year's one-day observational survey of vehicles illegally passing a stopped school bus. Participants in the survey, conducted annually by the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, included bus drivers from 36 states and Washington, D.C., some 31% of the nation's school bus drivers. About 60% of the 114,00 drivers reported nearly 68,000 illegal passings of their unmistakable yellow behemoths.

"And that's one single day," Rosenthal says. "There are things that we can do to prevent, or to try and prevent, some of these illegal passings from happening in the first place."

Public Awareness Campaigns

One of those is to step up public education and advocacy campaigns in schools and through social and traditional media outlets, Rosenthal says. A concerted effort is needed to educate the driving public of laws against passing a stopped school bus from in front or behind.

Every state has laws against passing a stopped school bus, though enforcement and penalties vary, Rosenthal says. Those laws are critical considering that riders getting on or off a bus are 1.5 times more likely to be hit and killed by a passing vehicle than those already on the bus. (For more information, see NHTSA's best practices guide.)

Using cameras mounted on the arms of stop signs on the driver's side of school buses shows promise as a way to curb illegal passing by photographing violators who are then cited and fined. Preventive strategies such as using enhanced bus lighting and audible warning systems are also being considered.

Thirty states now authorize school bus cameras, a sharp rise from 10 years ago. NHTSA has conducted three major research projects on bus safety technology that it hopes will lead more states to adopt and enforce safety laws.

"There's a lot of progress that we can make to change some of the laws … to have those stop-arm cameras," she says. "It's going to really take people hearing that a friend got fined."

Learning From Tragedy

Sometimes, it takes tragedy to get the message through, says Michael LaRocco, director of school transportation for the Indiana Department of Education.

Early one morning in October 2018, a school bus stopped on a rural state highway near Rochester, Ind., about 100 miles north of Indianapolis, to pick up students who lived in a mobile home park. Because the bus was not allowed to circulate in the park, kids had to cross the two-lane road, which had a 55 mph speed limit, in the dark to reach the bus stop.

The bus had its lights flashing and its stop sign arm extended, LaRocco says.

But that was not enough to stop the driver of a pickup truck from plowing into and killing three siblings, a 9-year-old girl and her 6-year-old twin brothers. A fourth student was seriously injured.

The truck's driver said she did not realize the bus was loading passengers and did not see the children until it was too late. She was convicted of three counts of reckless homicide in 2019 but was released from prison in 2022 and put on several years of home detention and probation.

The fatal accident prompted the school district to move the bus stop into the mobile home park so children no longer had to cross the road. Bus routes, stops and policies now must be reviewed annually, LaRocco says. The Legislature also increased fines for illegally passing a stopped school bus and required that students be able to reach bus stops outside a city's limits without crossing a roadway. Bus driver licensing and training also have been beefed up.

"Those were the biggest legislative changes specifically put in place in the state of Indiana because of this one particular crash," LaRocco says. "I would tell you a lot of things can be solved just by the way things are planned for roads, new subdivisions and new buildings."

State Action on School Bus Safety

School bus safety continues to attract attention in state legislatures; 39 states considered 186 measures on the topic in 2025, with 19 states enacting 27 bills.

Thirty states now have school bus stop-arm camera laws, with Colorado, Nevada and South Dakota joining the list in 2025.

Rhode Island, which had already authorized stop-arm cameras, mandated their installation on all new school buses by 2027 and on all school buses in the state by 2032. Wyoming is the only other state with a mandate for all buses to be equipped with such cameras.

Douglas Shinkle is an associate director in NCSL's Transportation Program.