During the past legislative session, as lawmakers were considering a bill addressing seat belts in school buses, 13-year-old Hannah Elder of Star City was front and center at the proposal’s committee hearing. Elder, who survived a car crash thanks to her seat belt, had been lobbying for a state law addressing safety restraints in school buses since she was a fifth-grader.

After hearing highway transportation experts testify to lawmakers that equipping school buses with seatbelts would have nominal life-saving impact, she turned to the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Mark McElroy of Tillar.

“I got tickled,” McElroy said, chuckling. “That little girl looked at me and said, ‘Why has the bus driver got one then? If we’re all going to be without seatbelts he needs to take his off and we’ll all take our chances.’ Who could argue with that?”

Proponents of the bill, HB 1002, got the last laugh when Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed the measure into law March 6, making Arkansas one of just a handful of states to have such a statute. The law applies to new school buses that are bought or leased in Arkansas school districts starting Jan. 1, 2018.

The statute is not a mandate, but creates a mechanism whereby 10 percent of citizens within individual school districts can petition to have the safety equipment added to a bus, paid for by increasing the local millage. Said millage increase would have to be passed at the polls in local elections.

“The way this law works, it’s really a local decision,” McElroy said. “Local people decide they want seatbelts and don’t mind paying this little extra millage.”

Statistics show fatalities on school buses are relatively rare; about 11 per year between 2006 and 2015. In fact, about twice as many people die from being hit by school buses rather than riding in them during a crash. But recent incidents have brought more attention to the issue including a 2015 rollover in Houston that killed two. A crash in Tennessee that killed six and two separate incidents in Indianapolis happened within a month of each other in late 2016.

Already this year, a school bus passenger in Wisconsin was injured after being ejected from the bus in a wreck and one person was hurt when a school bus collided with another vehicle in Pulaski County outside Landmark.

The relative scarcity of such incidents, questions of enforcement and proper use and the cost of adding the seat belts — around $10,000 on a new, $100,000 bus — has meant reform efforts have moved slowly.

Dr. Mary Aitken, director of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Injury Prevention Center, said she hoped that the new law raises awareness while it helps protect children.

“Some studies suggest that seat belts improve behavior on buses and are popular with drivers and parents once put in place,” she said. “In addition, there is some evidence that students using seat belts on school buses are more likely to use them in other forms of transportation, which is an important benefit since most crashes are in cars, not buses.”