Photo taken on November 16, 2011, shows the scene of a car crash which involved a school bus in Yulinzi Township, Zhengning County, Qingyang City, northwest China's Gansu Province. Nineteen people, including 17 preschoolers and two adults, died in a head-on collision between a school bus of a kindergarten and a truck in Yulinzi Township in Gansu on Wednesday. Photo: Xinhua
A recent school bus accident on Wednesday in Gansu Province, which caused at least 20 deaths and injured another 44 people, mostly children, was the result of an overcrowded bus and has urged a nationwide call for the establishment of a unified school bus safety management system in China.
Experts said the education authority, schools, and parents should all strengthen available efforts to jointly address this issue.
A van with only nine seats, carrying 64 people, collided with a coal truck while traveling to a kindergarten in the Yulinzi Township in Qingyang, Gansu Province, on Wednesday morning, according to the city's work safety bureau.
Fan Jungang, the van’s driver, and Li Jun, the principal of the kindergarten, were taken into custody on Thursday by the county police bureau, according to local authorities.
On the same day of the accident, the Ministry of Education issued a statement urging education organizations, middle and primary schools along with kindergartens to, "immediately inspect the safety conditions of the student buses traveling to and from schools.”
The bus accident has triggered a nationwide campaign, as required by the education authority from its statement, over school bus safety.
A 39-seat school bus, carrying 57 students and one adult in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province, on Wednesday afternoon, just several hours after the bus crash in Gansu, was pulled over by local police.
Police in Changsha, Hunan Province, also responded to the call from the education authority by promising to "keep a more stringent eye on overloaded school buses," said Xu Yuebo, deputy director of the Public Security Bureau, according to the Changsha Evening Post on Thursday.
Xu said they will now probably promote the use of specialized school vans, designed and manufactured for transporting students, and adopt a specialized van license plate management system in the future.
"A unified and scrutinized school bus safety management system is urgently needed in order to facilitate the inspection of driving qualifications, the working status of the bus drivers, and the performance of the vehicles, among other things, so as to avert future bus tragedies," Xia Xueluan, a sociology professor at Peking University, told the Global Times on Thursday.
The regulations on technical safety guarantees for transporting students, released by the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine in July 2010, said that every bus must be equipped with a teacher's seat, two emergency exits and a "black box" that can be used to record data from an accident. Two teacher's seats are required for buses which carry more than 40 students.
However, Xia said the regulation has been poorly implemented as a result of inadequate school funds, especially at schools which are privately-owned.
Education expense was targeted at taking up four percent of the GDP by the end of last century, according to China's Education Reform and Development Guidelines in 1993. However, the authority failed in its efforts as the government is still working to reach that target by the end of 2012 during the "two political sessions" from this year.
"Inadequate funds to purchase school buses and a poorly-matched number of transportation means, which often operate with poor maintenance and have a low guarantee of safety, are the operating realities of school buses," said Xia.
Despite the clear cut responsibilities shouldered by the bus drivers and the schools, parents also need to focus their safety awareness of the school buses, Xia added.