Indiana Serious Injury Lawyer Talks About Children on School Buses and Mini Bikes
As your Indiana Serious Injury Attorneys, I spend a lot of time thinking about safety. I come by it honestly, my dad was Indiana’s Serious Injury Lawyer, the go to guy for 60 years. Around our dinner table and in our lives we heard a lot about things that nobody else seemed to be talking about. In any event, I was reading today about a couple events that sparked the following question. What do school buses and mini bikes have in common? Of course they are both motorized vehicles, but short of that there seem to be a lot more differences than there are similarities. Well, School Buses carry children and that is exactly what mini bikes are designed to do.
Two school buses collided yesterday. The Mount Vernon School buses were carrying students in northwestern Hancock County. The bad news is that about thirty children were injured. The good news is that none of them were injured seriously. The collision occurred when one bus rear ended another. The bus driver told police that she was distracted because of a student acting up. If this account is accurate, this student’s action, likely without any thought about the possible consequences, put the lives of all the children in danger. Parents, take this time to talk to your children about the danger of distracting the driver. Tell them that if they are standing up in the bus while it is moving that their bodies are moving as fast as the bus and that if the bus has to stop quickly, their standing body will continue to move at the same speed and will either hi a metal seat or another student, both likely to result in bad injuries. Give them the tools to tell the other students, no, they are not going to do something dumb and put the others on the bus in danger.
In another story, two preteens were injured yesterday when the mini bike they were riding left the road and crashed. Unfortunately, and as is likely to happen, the passenger, who had no control over the bike or where it was going was injured. The passenger suffered significant brain injury and is a patient at Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis. Although the story does not mention it, I will bet a dime two things combined to allow this to happen. First, the children were not under the supervision of an adult. As a corollary to this, the adults left the min bike is such a position as to allow the children access to it when they were not around. The old saying is true, if something can happen, it will. If a child can get to something they will use it. The parents must make sure this cannot happen. The second thing is that I bet the parents who bought the mini bike for the child did little or nothing to teach the child safe operation techniques. Giving a child a mini bike and not teaching them safe riding techniques ids inviting a crash. Parents, let this be a lesson. Teach your children. They are smart, they will learn. Help them to help themselves and others.