Driving is never a safe activity. Getting behind the wheel will statistically be the most dangerous thing most of us do in our lives. Add a dash of cell phone users and people defying all common sense and sending text messages behind the wheel, and you’ve got a potentially dangerous mix. And now we have our kids thrown into it, too.
School had barely begun when North Carolina saw its first school bus death of the 2009-2010 year. Six-year-old Ashley Ramos-Hernandez was struck and killed by an 83-year-old woman driving a sports utility vehicle in Raleigh recently. Geraldine Baron Deitz faces charges of misdemeanor death by motor vehicle and passing a stopped school bus.
The police report on the incident stated that Deitz told law enforcement officials the bus hadn’t activated all of its warning signals. Regardless of the outcome of the case, it highlights a basic set of facts: School buses carry children. If you see a school bus, that means there are children in and/or around said school bus. Therefore, you need to exercise extra caution.
Ramos-Hernandez was the eighth North Carolina child in the last 10 years killed in incidents where motorists passed stopped school buses.
Buncombe County and Asheville City school buses are back on the roads starting Aug. 24. The county’s bus transportation system, the seventh-largest in the state, sees nearly 300 buses transporting 16,800 students 16,000 miles a day. Traveling by bus is extremely safe; the dangers occur when children are getting on or off or waiting for buses.
The consequences for a fatality that occurs after someone ignores a school bus signal arm are about to change. Current laws says doing so is not “culpable negligence,” as is reckless driving. Under the Nicholas Adkins School Bus Safety Act, if someone is killed after a driver runs a school bus stop sign the offense is a Class H felony, raising the specter of jail time significantly.
The Act, signed by Gov. Beverly Perdue in June, will take effect Dec. 1. The bill was named for a Rockingham High School student who was killed in January after a driver ran an extended school bus arm signal. Its sponsors were Rep. Dale Folwell, R-Winston-Salem, and Rep. Nelson Cole, D-Reidsville. Rep. Folwell’s 7-year-old son died in such an incident in 1999.
For the record: If a bus is stopped to pick up students, motorists are required to stop if they’re traveling the same direction as the bus, and also if they’re traveling the opposite direction unless the road has a median or physical barrier or is a four-lane highway split by a center-turn lane. For some people, those simple rules seem to be quite difficult to absorb. A one-day “stop arm” count in Buncombe earlier this year saw 70 violations reported by bus drivers. Over the course of a school year that would come to well over 10,000 such incidents. One is all it takes to change, or end, a life.
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