Every school day, Derek Brooks gets on the bus at 3:30 p.m. at Fernan STEM Academy. He stays on the bus at the first stop and gets off at the second. Sometimes his mom and grandma meet him in the cul-de-sac and walk him down the block to their house.

“We’ve had great bus drivers here; you don’t hear about too many accidents with buses in this area,” said Lisa Brooks, Derek’s mom. “And I think the district is very good about cancelling or delaying school when road conditions are bad.”

However, every once in awhile, Brooks remembers what happened to the child of a family friend years ago. The family’s daughter was in a bus accident and suffered lacerations on her face.

Brooks said she wonders, if the bus had seat belts, would the girl have gotten hurt?

As the Coeur d’Alene School District begins to replace its aging bus fleet, the school board is also looking at an old but very relevant question: Should school buses have seat belts?

The board is acutely aware of last month’s tragedy in Chattanooga, Tenn., where a school bus flipped on its side and slammed into a tree, splitting the bus apart and killing six of the 35 elementary school students on board. Coeur d’Alene district officials decided to look at the safety measures in place for students riding school buses, but not for the first time.

The school board, along with the rest of the nation, looked at the seat belt issue in 2014 during a spike in school bus accidents. The district decided not to install seat belts because of the cost and the lack of certainty from national organizations about actual benefits.

Trustee Tom Hearn brought the issue to the board’s attention again because he had been receiving many comments from parents and concerned citizens.

“My position is if the community is well aware of the cost and willing to pay for it, we should do it,” Hearn said. “I think the community supports this.”

During the recession, the school board decided to slow its bus purchases to save money. Now, about one third of the district’s bus fleet is in need of replacement, so the board is deciding whether or not to replace it with buses that have seat belts.

A new bus is about $100,000, but ones with seat belts already installed are more expensive — about $10,000 to $20,000 more, according to Brian Wallace.

Wallace, the Coeur d’Alene School District director of finance and operations, said the most cost-effective way to get seat belts in school buses is to gradually buy new buses that already have them as old buses depreciate and get taken out of the fleet.

The state pays school districts for 85 percent of the cost of each new bus. The payments come over the course of 12 years. If the new buses have seat belts, the state would be helping to pay the additional cost, he explained.

Retrofitting seat belts into an existing bus fleet, however, is much more expensive.

The Coeur d’Alene School District estimates it would cost almost $1 million to install seat belts in its fleet of 51 general education buses. That estimate does not include special education buses.

The district would also have to buy about 10 new buses with seat belts to make up for the reduced seating space. Buses with seat belts can only fit two secondary students on each seat, as opposed to three. The district would need more buses to serve the same amount of students.

The state would not help pay for retrofitting school buses, so the district would have to get a grant or go to taxpayers for help.

“Phasing [buses with seat belts] in, I think, that would be the easiest way to afford it,” said Board Chair Casey Morrisroe. “But what if an accident is on one of the buses without belts? For me, it’s tough because we’re looking at the safety of kids here.”

The Coeur d’Alene school board will most likely not make a decision about seat belts until the district knows if its levy passes in March. Part of the levy money, enough to buy six new buses without seat belts, would be dedicated to maintaining the district’s bus fleet.

Coeur d’Alene School District Superintendent Matt Handelman noted that districts in other states have gotten seat belts into their school buses, so there is a way to do it.

“Although it can sound a bit impersonal and mean, it’s about balancing the cost benefit,” Handelman said. “If we had unlimited resources, why would we not put in that additional safeguard? There’s still a lot of questions we need to examine.”

One of those things to examine is that school buses are already very safe without seat belts. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, it’s about eight times safer to ride to and from school-related activities in a school bus than in cars.

The NHTSA sent a report on school bus safety to Congress and put out a summary of that report last June. The summary reported that the 450,000 school buses in the nation travel a collective 4.3 billion miles and transport 23.5 million children.

The fatality rate for school buses is 0.2 deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled. The fatality rate for cars is 1.5 deaths for every 100 million vehicle miles traveled.

Bus drivers themselves go through extensive training in safety and evacuation plans and regularly have their driving records checked.

“The state department requires at least 10 hours of training, but we do about 40 to 50,” said Jill Hill, the district’s director of transportation. “I just want to make sure the drivers feel confident and comfortable. The most important thing is the safety of our passengers.”

When students ride in school buses, they’re surrounded by a “protective envelope created by strong, closely-spaced seats that have energy absorbing high seat backs that protect occupants in the event of a crash,” according to the NHTSA report summary.

Another safety measure is that the seats in buses are higher off the ground than the impact zone if an average car were to T-bone the bus. The size of buses also helps to better distribute impact — small impacts and fender benders are hardly felt by people inside school buses.

Even the bright yellow nature of school buses is a safety measure. The color, the flashing lights and the stop sign on the sides of buses all make them that much more visible.

Pat Carper, a first-year driver, said he trusts the school district to do the right thing.

“Anything the district does, it seems like safety is the main, if not only, concern,” he said. “I’m not sure what problem seat belts would solve, but if there’s evidence they are safer or save lives, they’d be in here in a minute.”

The majority of the Coeur d’Alene district bus drivers that The Press spoke to said they think seat belts would be a good thing, but they had two main concerns. First, it would be very hard for the drivers to make sure kids kept their seat belts on, and second, some drivers were concerned students would use the seat belts as weapons.

“It would be a great idea; keeping them on the kids would be the trick,” said Ken Garul, who has been driving school buses for the Coeur d’Alene School District for 12 years. “School buses are the safest way to get to school. If somebody wanted to put seat belts in a bus that would be fine ... but it’s hard to monitor who has seat belts on.”

The Post Falls School District has been watching the national conversation for many years now, waiting for direction from the state.

“My understanding for why they haven’t implemented it is there are some pretty significant logistical issues to it,” said Post Falls School District Superintendent Jerry Keane. “We will certainly comply whether or not it's required.”

The Coeur d’Alene School District and school board is seeking input from parents, community members and local first responders about the issue.

“If a bus gets in an accident and some kids get hurt, and we know that those kids could have been saved by seat belts, I’m going to have a hard time looking a parent in the eye saying, ‘Sorry. We couldn’t afford that,’” Hearn said.