Producer Shachar Bar-On came into my office wanting to know whether we could use computerized records to show a federal agency was not enforcing school bus safety laws. We could, and it's a story that could be done by many local and regional news organizations around the country.
A little-known federal law forbids car dealers from selling vans to schools. Schools save money by buying vans, which cost less to operate than traditional, small-sized yellow school buses. But experts say vans are far less safe for transporting students - mainly because of inferior structural protection and interior padding. Manufacturers do include warning letters in these vans that clearly state "not a school bus."
The safety question is not hypothetical. In July 1994, a truck rammed into a school van in South Carolina, killing 6-year-old Jacob Strebler. Yet 18 months earlier, in an almost identical accident in the same part of town, a truck had slammed into a small-sized school bus - and none of the children was seriously hurt. Dateline found Strebler was one of at least a dozen children who died in vans they were never supposed to be in. According to experts, they most likely would have survived if they had been in school buses.
The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is supposed to check whether vans are being sold to schools. The law is a little unusual: it is illegal for dealers to sell the vans to schools but not illegal for schools to own them. Since the 1974 law took effect, NHTSA has taken 10 enforcement actions against dealers for selling vans to schools. NHTSA said it only has so much staff to handle all its duties.
But by using vehicle databases, Dateline showed how easily the agency could be checking on vans sold to schools for transporting students. We picked a state, Texas - and obtained its database for motor vehicles. We looked at vehicles owned by schools and then analyzed the data to find which schools owned vans for transporting students. We found hundreds. The point was not only to show that vans were being sold to schools but also to prove that it was not hard to enforce the law. It helped us question NHTSA about how it was not taking simple steps to prevent the deals from happening.
Record roadblocks
The school van safety story is one that many news organizations across the country could do for their own communities. Bar-On and Dateline correspondent Bob McKeown did terrific reporting. We encountered a few difficulties. For example, we examined hundreds of thousands of computerized accident reports in the U.S. Department of Transportation's Fatal Accident Reporting System. These records were not perfect. In a few instances, vans were incorrectly marked as being used by schools. More often, vans were not properly identified as being used by schools.
To help determine which vans are used to transport children, we paid particular attention to vehicle identification numbers - an automobile's equivalent of a Social Security number. It is not a random set of numbers and letters. It describes the vehicle, including any seating arrangement, and can be decoded with easily obtainable reference books or databases. By doing this, we separated vans for hauling maintenance equipment from those for transporting students.
This is also an example of a story that may not be possible in certain states, depending on privacy laws and rules on electronic access to data. While many states provide access to vehicle ownership records, this is not true everywhere - another reminder that journalists need strong open-records laws to do their job.
Andy Lehren can be reached by e-mail at alehren@nbc.com