After a school bus rolled on a West Virginia highway two years ago — forcing one boy to have his leg amputated and seriously injuring two other children on board — police quickly discovered that the driver was drunk.
But the National Transportation Safety Board then uncovered something even more troubling: drunk school bus drivers were not an isolated problem.
That's why the NTSB on Thursday recommended for the first time that all new school buses be equipped with alcohol detection systems that can disable the bus if they detect the driver might be impaired.
"There's a higher expectation for school bus drivers than many other types of drivers," said Kris Poland, deputy director of the NTSB's Office of Highway Safety. "We expect that drivers are attentive, not fatigued, not impaired, and are driving as safely as possible."
The agency didn't estimate the cost of adding the detection systems to buses or say who would foot the bill. The kind of ignition interlock device that people charged with DUIs are routinely required to install costs about $75 to $150 upfront and roughly $100 a month to monitor.
Federal regulators or states could require the technology, but Congress would have to pass legislation to ensure widespread adoption. The NTSB recommendation focuses on alcohol, not drugs, because the agency determined alcohol was the probable cause of this crash, and there aren't similar tests available for other drugs like marijuana. There also aren't clear legal standards for exactly how much of other drugs is enough to impair a driver.
It follows a previous recommendation by the NTSB that Congress adopted to require alcohol detection systems in all new passenger vehicles. But that rule has yet to be rolled out because it is still caught up in the rulemaking process.
The NTSB has long been concerned about drunken driving because alcohol is a factor in one-third of the roughly 37,000 traffic deaths each year. Investigators struggled to pin down exact statistics on how common the problem is among school bus drivers, but they found enough evidence to conclude that alcohol detection systems are needed.
None of the federal highway safety agencies track school bus driver DUIs separately from other commercial drivers, and the data doesn't always include every allegation if there wasn't a fatal crash involved.
But a report by the news service Stateline.org in 2020 showed that at least 118 school bus drivers had been accused of driving drunk over the previous five years, said Meg Sweeny, the primary author of the NTSB report on the West Virginia bus crash.
In that crash, the driver lost control of the bus after hitting a driveway culvert off the right side of a rural road. All 19 children on board were injured, but most had only minor injuries. The driver was sentenced last year to up to 110 years in prison.
The number of drunken driving cases among bus drivers was alarming, even though it remains a small portion of all drivers, said Peter Kurdock, general counsel for Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety.
"Children going to and from school are America's most precious passengers," Kurdock said. "So we should be doing all we can to make the bus as safe as possible."
But Kurdock predicted the proposal will likely face pushback from the owners of the nation's half-million school buses, much like the industry has opposed the NTSB's longstanding recommendation to add seat belts to school buses.
Several states have required seat belts, but most school buses do not have them, partly because the buses are already regarded as quite safe. Even when seat belts have been installed, the NTSB said students might not wear them, so the agency issued an urgent recommendation last fall after a Texas crash urging districts to take steps to ensure their use.
None of the three largest school bus companies, which transport children on some 80,000 buses each day, nor the primary bus manufacturers responded to phone calls and emails seeking comment about the NTSB recommendation. The National School Boards Association also did not immediately comment.
Most school bus trips remain safe, according to the NTSB.
Of the nearly 1,000 fatal crashes involving school buses in the decade leading up to 2023, 70% of the nearly 1,100 people who died were in other vehicles, not on the buses, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's latest statistics.
Only 113 school bus passengers were killed during that timeframe, underscoring how the large yellow vehicles are generally safe—so long as children are not thrown from their seats. That is where the NTSB believes installing seat belts, and ensuring they are worn, would make a significant difference.
Attorney Todd Spodek, whose New York law firm has handled tens of thousands of drunken driving cases, said he does not believe the recommendation would violate the rights of bus drivers. He also does not think drivers would be able to argue that being screened for alcohol use is too onerous.
Spodek said the safety benefits of ensuring bus drivers are not impaired far outweigh any concerns about inconvenience.
"If you're in a position of control over something like that, you should be held to greater scrutiny," Spodek said. "It's a minor inconvenience with a tremendous upside."
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