CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — Across the Coastal Bend, school districts are using a mixture of buses with and without seatbelts used to transport students and staff.
Alice ISD Transportation Director and Supervisor Daniel Lee Galvan said the school district got 10 new school buses equipped with seatbelts last year.
"We cannot buy buses anymore that do not have seatbelts because the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration put out that all of them have to come out with seatbelts," Galvan said.
Although Senate Bill 693 was passed, not all buses are required to be equipped with seatbelts. The law only applies to buses bought by a school district after 2017.
"The older buses are actually grandfathered into this new law. So, it's not required to have seatbelts on the older buses and the FMCSA regulations do not show that as far as the specs," Galvan said.
Corpus Christi ISD Director of Transportation Kyle Pelichet said they have 16 buses that do not have seatbelts. Those are only used as spare buses for the district in case of emergencies.
"They're older motor buses and they're schedules to be auctioned off and replaced here over the next 2 years," Pelichet said.
We checked in with six largest school districts in our area to see the number of buses with and without seatbelts. The only one that did not get back to us was Gregory-Portland ISD.
The bus crash in Bastrop County that killed two, has forced many school districts like CCISD to consider how to make transportation safer for their students.
"We're constantly safety is our number one priority and we're constantly looking at ways to make things safer for the transport of our students," Pelichet said.
For 16 years, Rogelio De Leon has been a bus driver at Alice ISD and he said the seatbelts help assure parents their children will return home safely.
"My point of view is it will save a lot of lives in the school buses," De Leon said.
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