SAN ANTONIO – Texas lawmakers approved a statewide requirement for all public school buses be equipped with three-point seat belts by Sept. 1, 2029.
The restraint is similar to the seat belt used in most passenger vehicles, but it is not currently standard across many public school bus fleets.
The mandate comes from Senate Bill 546, authored by State Sen. José Menéndez.
KSAT previously spoke with Northside Independent School District’s Director of Transportation Tesilia Soliz and Northeast Independent School District’s Executive Director of Transportation Bill Harrison about the mandate.
“We’re hopeful that there will be grants available,” Harrison said, “but there’s no detail about any of that yet.”
Both NEISD and NISD leaders said their district’s can not afford the state mandated upgrades on the number of buses needed.
Menéndez shared more on plans to get funding for these districts.
“We could not just pass another unfunded mandate onto schools just to tell them look, you have to do this and not provide them the resources,” Menendez said.
However, there are still several outstanding concerns including how many districts need to upgrade their buses, how much the upgrades will cost and enforcing a seat belt implementation.
“We have put some money, I think $10 million into a grant for schools to apply to have their fleets updated with three-point seat belts,” Menendez said.
However, that won’t even cover the upgrades at Northeast ISD alone.
“It will cost about $13 million if we have to retrofit all those,” Harrison said.
Texas school districts had to inform the Texas Education Agency the number of buses the district has, the type of seat belts on each of those buses and how much the upgrades would cost by May 29.
In an email on June 24, TEA said “Data submissions are still under review by the agency.” The agency also said it has until January 2027 to report that information.
School district’s across the state have until Sept. 1, 2029 to retrofit all buses to have three-point seatbelts.
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