School Bus Accident Liability, Negligence and Standards of Care Guidelines
A school’s duty to protect its students from harm doesn’t begin and end when the bell rings in the morning and afternoon. Transporting students safely to and from school is an important consideration in a school’s risk portfolio. This area, however, is highly nuanced, and it’s not always immediately clear who is liable for a student’s accident-related injury — especially when transportation is contracted out to a private bus company.
What should an attorney consider when representing a plaintiff or a defendant in lawsuits involving school bus accidents? Here’s a roadmap to follow regarding school bus accident liability, negligence and standards of care.
Determining Duty to Protect: School District vs. School Bus Company
Attorneys should first determine which entity was responsible for protecting the passengers on board. If the school owns its own buses, the school has the duty to protect students and others on the bus from harm. If the school contracts out transportation services to a private bus company, the contract between the school and the bus company should specify duties.
As an example, schools that transport students with significant physical disabilities typically provide specialized training for bus drivers and aides. This training may include, among other things, how to harness a wheelchair to the floor of the vehicle and how to intervene if a child becomes disruptive. Such training is a reasonable expectation for protecting students’ safety. But is the school responsible for the training provided by a private bus company? Or does that responsibility lie with the contractor?
This responsibility, if delegated to the bus company, should be articulated in the contact. By requiring that drivers and aides be trained, the school recognized its duty to protect its students. The school can delegate this responsibility, but for liability to fall to the bus company in the case of an accident, this must be in the contract. If a bus carrying students in wheelchairs is involved in an accident and a child’s wheelchair was not properly harnessed, broke loose, and caused injury, then the school may be liable if it failed to spell out the private bus company’s requirement to train its staff in this manner.
In another example, if the contract between a school and a bus company requires that the company provide booster seats for all preschool passengers, the company has a duty to provide the seats and to ensure they are being used. The attorney should assume that school officials determined that the seats are necessary to protect the students from harm. If a child is hurt in an accident because he or she was not in a booster seat, as required, the bus company may be liable for the child’s injury.
Another contract between a school and a private bus company might require the company to provide a bus aide who is trained in how to de-escalate confrontational encounters between students with behavioral problems. Now, consider this example: Despite the presence of a trained aide on the bus, students got into a fight. Distracted, the driver hit a guardrail, and a student was injured as a result. The bus company may be liable for the injury, but what is the duty of the school to ensure that the private bus company is complying with the contract? Ultimately, the school is responsible for the health, safety, and welfare of its students. Should the school check periodically on the implementation of specific safety requirements in the contract? Or can the school delegate this responsibility entirely and assume that the private bus company will comply?
This example illustrates how it may not always be clear whom to name in a complaint. In the case of a contract like this, no professional standard of care exists in the field to provide clear guidance on whether the school must ensure that the contract is being fulfilled and that its students are safe.
Determining Standards of Care in School Bus Accident Lawsuits
Schools that maintain their own bus fleets, as well as private bus companies, must meet federal and state standards. These include:
- Maintaining buses in safe operating condition through a systematic preventive maintenance program
- Inspecting buses at least semiannually
- Requiring drivers to perform daily pre-trip inspections of their vehicles and the safety equipment (such as the fire extinguishers), and to report promptly and in writing any problems that may affect the safety of the vehicle’s operation or result in its mechanical breakdown
Schools and private bus companies add their own standards when they develop driver manuals, training programs, and procedures such as assigning bus aides and checking that video cameras work properly. Therefore, attorneys should be familiar not only with federal and state requirements, but also with school standards — and, when a private transportation contractor is involved, the bus company’s standards as well. Manuals, written procedures not included in the manuals, training program materials, and any other written or oral communication that can be construed as policy should be obtained through discovery and carefully reviewed to identify all applicable standards of care before an investigating into the cause of an accident and injury begins.
An attorney will want to determine whether a school or private school bus company violated a federal or state standard. In addition, the attorney needs to determine whether any locally identified standard or a standard identified through a contract was breached, and whether that breach created a situation that placed passengers in harm’s way.
Determining Negligence and if Standards of Care Were Met
Once the attorney has an understanding of these standards, and after questions about who had the duty to protect passengers are answered, the next step is to investigate the cause of the accident. If the driver lost control, was there, for instance, a flat tire and the driver maintained the best control possible but the accident happened anyway? Was there a mechanical problem with the bus that should have been noticed through reasonable inspections and corrected? Did a fight on the bus distract the driver? Did the driver swerve to avoid hitting something on the road?
Here are the steps to follow:
- Review and list all federal, state, and local standards that apply, such as inspection routines, licensing of the driver, assignment of aides to the bus, and training of the driver and/or aide.
- Review and analyze the discovery, including the accident report and other documents, to identify what standards, if any, were breached.
- Review the information in the discovery against the standards that were breached and determine whether a breach of any of the standards may explain the accident and whether a breach may constitute negligence and can be a proximate cause of the accident resulting injury.
As attorneys know, proximate cause can be elusive — or sometimes, it can be right up front. If, for instance, the driver was distracted by a fight on the bus and there was no bus aide present as required by local standard, this breach of duty may be determined to be the proximate cause of the accident. But the next question that must be answered is: Even with that breach of duty, would the fight have occurred anyway? If an appropriately trained aide was on the bus, would the aide have been able to end the fight before the driver was distracted?
If a contracted bus company had a policy of weekly in-depth inspections of buses and a brake failure resulted in injury, the company may be liable if it inspected and discovered a problem but didn’t repair it. Investigating the inspection routine and determining whether a reasonable inspection would have identified the brake problem is an important step. If the bus company failed to inspect the condition of brakes, as required by its inspection protocol, and that failure can be shown to be the proximate cause of injury, the bus company may be held liable as a result of the breach of its own standard.
Negligence and School Bus Accident Personal Injuries
A 1986 case, Settles v. Incorporated Village of Freeport (132 Misc. 2d 240, 503 N.Y.S.2d 945 [N.Y.Sup.Ct. 1986]), demonstrates these principles: When a school provides transportation for students, it has a duty to transport them safely, and the school ordinarily cannot avoid its liability for failing to transport its pupils safely by delegating performance of its duty to a private school bus company. The court went on to say that generally, the party that engages the private school bus company is not responsible for the negligence of the company or its employees, and the doctrine of respondeat superior does not apply, However, where work involved may be characterized as inherently dangerous (transporting school children), the duties of the employer (the school) are nondelegable and the school may be liable for the negligence of its contractor (the bus company) if it did not reasonably monitor the contractor’s compliance activities. Further, the school remains liable for injuries caused by negligence of the private bus company if the school fails to use reasonable care to select a competent contractor, where the contractor was in fact incompetent.
For a plaintiff’s attorney, the first foundational fact to develop is that school bus accidents ordinarily do not happen without negligence. A defendant’s attorney, however, may argue that the accident does not support an inference that negligence was involved.
The plaintiff’s burden of proof is not to eliminate all possible alternative causes of injury. The burden is to show that the more probable cause was negligence. If there was negligence, is it attributable to the school or the contracted school bus company? Would this event ordinarily occur in the absence of negligence? The defendant’s attorney may argue that any negligence is attributable to a third party, and not to any breach of standard of the defendant’s duty.
In light of the many questions and potential variables involved, the establishment of negligence, proximate cause, and who bears ultimate responsibility for the safety of students in transit can be challenging. An expert witness specializing in school safety issues can help plaintiff’s and defendant’s attorneys analyze the facts and determine the root of risks that materialize and result in student injury.
