mmilliken@heraldsun.com; 419-6684
DURHAM -- State officials hope that a new law that takes effect today will convince motorists to stop for stopped school buses and therefore protect children.
"I think it's a wonderful addition," said Scott Denton, executive director of transportation for the Durham public school system. "Heretofore, it's been difficult to prosecute violators of ... the school bus stop-arm law, and this particular addition will certainly be helpful going forward to bring those to justice who do violate the law."
The Nicholas Adkins School Bus Safety Act allows districts to mount cameras on buses to help prosecute drivers who illegally pass stationary school buses that are displaying stop signs. It also recategorizes the killing of a pedestrian while illegally passing a stopped school bus as a Class H felony, which makes the imprisonment of a defendant more likely upon conviction than was previously the case.
One of the bill's primary sponsors was state Rep. Dale Folwell, R-Winston-Salem, whose 7-year-old son was killed in 1999 by a driver who failed to heed a stop arm.
Co-sponsor Rep. Bill Faison, D-Cedar Grove, who represents part of Orange County, can't understand why a driver would pass a stationary school bus.
"What those lights and sign say is that there are young children at risk at this location and that we all need to take every precaution we can to protect them," Faison said.
"It's just completely unacceptable that a child in this vulnerable position could be injured," he added.
Derek Graham, the state Department of Public Instruction section chief for transportation services, said that only a handful of children were struck and killed near stopped school buses in the past decade. (There is no system for tracking injuries that result from those situations.) There were six deaths from 1999 to 2004, none from 2005 to last year, and two this year.
The new law is named after a 16-year-old who was killed in January near his Stoneville home by a driver who passed a stopped school bus. About two months after the bill passed, a 6-year-old Raleigh girl was killed by a motorist who failed to stop for a school bus.
In 2007-08, there were three convictions for passing a stopped school bus and none for striking a person in the course of doing so, legislative analysts found. But Graham's section annually conducts one-day tallies of drivers who illegally pass stationary school buses and found 2,416 violations this year, with 17.1 percent of all buses in the survey being passed. Those were the highest such numbers since 2006.
Five school districts -- Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Duplin, Iredell, Johnston and Watauga -- have mounted pairs of forward- and backward-facing video cameras on the outside of buses at a cost of about $350 per bus. The cameras are important because a driver, not just a license plate, must be identified in court to win conviction. This barrier has proven difficult to overcome.
"If we're able to get the kind of results that we're hoping to from this kind of camera, then by spring we would be letting school systems know this is working, this is how you would proceed if you want to undertake it in your area," Graham said.
The recommendations will be made in consultation with police and prosecutors.
About half of Durham buses have internal video cameras that monitor student and driver conduct, Denton said. The video systems the district installed can't be expanded to accommodate external cameras.
Administrators would eventually like to wire remaining buses with internal and external cameras, said Denton. He stated that Durham has had many close calls but no deaths or injuries from vehicles passing stopped buses.
