When Do You Stop For A School Bus? Know The Law In Massachusetts

MASSACHUSETTS — School buses will soon join the normal mix of morning and afternoon traffic on Massachusetts roads. Knowing stop arm laws — and following them — can save the lives of dozens of children killed every year in America getting on or off the school bus, transportation safety officials say.

It’s illegal in all 50 states to pass a stopped school bus under those conditions. In Massachusetts, the law requires all vehicles to stop when a school bus has its lights flashing and the stop sign extended.

In 2023, the most recent year for which data is available, 128 people died nationwide in school bus-related accidents, according to the National Safety Council.

One of those deaths was in Massachusetts, including:

The death occurred on Friday, Sept. 29 when the female bus driver was killed in the accident.

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Not all the fatalities in 2023 were the result of a motorist’s failure to follow school bus stop arm laws. However, in most cases when children are injured or killed, it’s when the bus is stopped, the lights are flashing and the stop arm is extended, according to safety experts.

Every year, nearly 500,000 school buses take about 25 million elementary through high school students to and from school, traveling about 5.7 million miles in a single school year. These kids are 70 times more likely to arrive at school alive than those students who get to school by other means, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

However, the National Transportation Safety Board noted on its website, “far too many drivers simply choose to ignore the law for their own convenience and put children at risk.”

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There is some good news. The National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation estimated in a study released last month that illegal passing of stopped school buses is going down.

Still, the organization's 2024-2025 school year survey of bus drivers estimated that there were an estimated 218,000 illegal passings nationwide during the last school year. The survey is taken on a single day, with 114,239 school bus drivers in 35 states participating, and the data is adjusted and projected to provide an estimated national total.

Projected across a 180-day school year, these sample results point to more than 39.3 million violations per year among America’s motoring public, according to the organization.

The survey has been conducted every year since 2011, except for 2020 and 2021, when many schools were closed for the COVID-19 pandemic.

The school bus transportation directors’ group said the survey has increased awareness among state and federal policymakers, who have increased penalties for violations, authorized the use of photo evidence for issuing citations, or enacted other measures designed to deter this dangerous practice.

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Even with greater awareness, “the illegal passing of stopped school buses continues to be the greatest safety danger to children,” the group’s president, Mike Stier, said in a statement.

That was tragically illustrated in an illegal school bus passing in 2018 that resulted in the deaths of three young Indiana siblings while they were crossing the road to get on the school bus.

That led the National Transportation Safety Board, an independent agency within the U.S. Department of Transportation, to recommend that states allow stop arm cameras as an enforcement tool. The agency also recommended that school districts minimize the number of school bus stops that require children to cross a roadway.

So far, at least 26 states have adopted stop arm camera laws.

Increasingly in recent years, state legislatures have adopted policies to improve bus safety. Along with the camera push, a requirement for seat belt use on school buses is a keystone policy.

NHTSA data also shows that an average of six student passengers die a year in school bus crashes. The agency recommended in 2018 that states adopt legislation requiring passenger lap and shoulder belts on all new large school bus purchases.