Editor’s note:

    ON Saturday, Christmas Eve, an overloaded van taking 12 students home plunged into a 60-meter-deep valley in Guangnan County, Yunnan Province, killing seven people and injuring seven others.

    The eight-seater, loaded with 14 people, rolled into the valley from a mountainous road in the county of Guangnan. The fatalities include the driver, five students, and an elderly man.

    Investigations showed the school refused to rent school buses, and gave the excuse the road condition was not suitable for buses. Parents were forced to rent vans for their children at their own expense. They must sign an agreement with the school for the safety of children, otherwise they could not be enrolled.

    It is the second traffic accident involving student fatalities in Yunnan last week amid a string of fatal school bus accidents across the country that raised national concern over school transport safety, especially in rural areas. On Nov. 16, 19 children died when their bus crashed in Gansu Province, while on Dec. 14, 15 preschoolers were killed when their overloaded bus had an accident in Jiangsu Province.

    AT present, only 10 percent of the country’s 285,000 school buses meet national safety standards. Education experts and lawmakers have called for more financial support to improve this situation.

    A report in China Youth Daily recently quoted an unnamed official from the Ministry of Education, the drafting of school bus safety management is under way. However, these standards are only binding for manufacturers — not for school bus service operators, and many schools transport students using ordinary vehicles, or even farm vehicles.

    The high cost of running and maintaining the specially designed buses may be one of the reasons for the problem, the article said.

    According to the report, the average price of a qualified school bus is 100,000 to 200,000 yuan (US$15,800 to 31,600), higher than other similar coaches, and long idle times while students are at school or on vacation also affects the profitability of the buses. The newspaper quoted Li Qiang, a manager of an automobile manufacturer in Henan Province as saying that in 2009, the company sold 200 school buses, and sales hit a “record” 1,000 this year.

    However, the figure is still small compared to sales of the company’s other vehicles that reached 40,000 last year.

    The problem of transporting students is exacerbated in rural areas, as over the past 10 years, primary schools have almost halved in an attempt to cull underperforming schools, forcing many students to travel further.

    The report cited another official source who said about 74 percent of those killed in school bus accidents over the past five years were rural students.

    An initial calculation revealed that the cost of equipping kindergartens and schools nationwide with qualified buses may reach 300 billion yuan, and the annual maintenance cost will top 150 billion yuan, the report said.

    However, Yang Dongping, a professor of education with the Beijing Institute of Technology, said the draft provision is not specific enough to answer the question of “who should pay for the school bus services.”

    Although it is unrealistic to suggest public spending can cover all the expenses, the government should not shirk its responsibility, Yang said.

    “When it comes to the matter of education and school bus safety, costs should not be put at the top of the list,” said Ye Qing, another national lawmaker in Hubei Province.

    Ye and Wang Xuming, a former Education Ministry spokesman, also suggested slashing public spending on official vehicles to subsidize the school bus services.(Han Ximin)

    80% support priority for school buses

    ACCORDING to an ongoing online survey conducted by Sina Weibo, China's Twitter-like microblogging service, about 80 percent of the 4,620 respondents are in support of giving priority to school buses in traffic, following a draft regulation on school bus safety management was made public by the Legislative Affairs Office of the State Council, seeking public opinion.

    The draft proposed that school buses have right of way in traffic under the command of police, the vehicles will be able to use bus lanes in rush hour, and private vehicles will be forbidden from overtaking when a school bus signals that it is picking up children.

    “Many privileges that government officials and their cars have in traffic are entirely unfair and outrageous, but I strongly support such privileges being given to children for their safety,” Yixinyiyi wrote in a post accompanying the survey.

    “Children are the future of the nation and deserve such privileges for their vulnerability in traffic,” Woshiroroya wrote.

    Many people hoped the government would pay particular attention to financing buses for children in rural areas, where the distances being covered from homes to schools are generally greater than in cities.(Han Ximin)