COLUMBUS, Ohio — A new bill introduced in the Ohio House of Representatives aims to make kids safer on the school bus.
House Bill 279 has been in the works since last year after an 11-year-old student was killed in a school bus crash in Clark County.
After the crash, Governor Mike DeWine formed the Ohio School Bus Safety Working Group to come up with recommendations to make buses safer. House Bill 279 incorporates 13 of the recommendations, including putting seatbelts on buses, but in the latest version of the bill the recommendations are not mandatory.
State Rep. Bernie Willis (R-Springfield) sponsored the bill and introduced it in the House Transportation Committee Tuesday.
"Those features are permissive," Willis told the committee. "There are no mandates, and it allows each school district the flexibility to determine which safety measures best meet their needs."
10TV interviewed Willis Wednesday about the changes to the legislation. He said he believes it will still be effective without the mandates.
"What we found is districts told us that there are a lot of things they would like to do with their buses," Willis said.
He says only about 5% of districts surveyed around the state wanted seatbelts for their buses.
"But the vast majority of them don't see that as something that they need, but they did say if we can get more LED lighting on our buses to light them up, if we could get cameras on those buses to help the bus driver in identifying people that are passing those buses, then we want those things," Willis said.
Willis says the cost of mandating safety measures was a big factor in changing the bill.
"From the very beginning we knew that we didn't want some kind of unfunded mandate," Willis said. "It's probably one of the biggest concerns of everyone, my colleagues in here and in the committee, and that was we can't go levy another problem that the school districts are going to have to figure out on their shoestring budgets."
The bill would provide $25 million in funding. School districts can apply for grants from that fund to improve school bus safety as they see fit.
State Representative Richard Brown (D- Canal Winchester) says the effectiveness of seatbelts also came up in the working group, which he was not part of.
"From the report I've read it looks like the consensus was this is something there's enough debate over the issue that they decided to leave it up to the individual school districts to decide for themselves."
The bill also calls for stricter penalties for those who illegally pass buses that are loading or unloading kids.
Willis and Brown say the bill has broad bipartisan support and believe it has a chance to pass in both chambers of the legislature and become law by the end of the year.