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“School buses are one of the safest forms of transportation in the United States,” according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. More than 42,000 people die in traffic crashes each year, but only about six of them are children in school buses.

The transportation director of a school district in New York state, Larry Dreher, told the Hillsdale, N.Y., Independent, "The number of injuries and deaths that occur on school buses are extremely small. I can't think of any other things that could improve the safety of them." Bus drivers must also undergo a screening process to ensure safety, he said.

Mandatory seat belt use in Minnesota is just a matter of time, the Kasson-Mantorville School District transportation director, Larry Meeker, told the Dodge County Independent. The costs of retrofitting old buses with seat belts might be high and enforcing children to wear them could prove difficult, but if passengers in the Cottonwood crash were wearing belts, fatalities might have been prevented, Meeker said.

A resident of Billings, Mont., Kelly Walker, reflecting on the bus crash in Minnesota, wrote to the Billings Gazette: “My children are safer riding in their own vehicles (with seat belts) than riding in school buses. We owe it to our kids to keep them safe on the way to school as well as in the classroom.” The federal government should mandate that bus companies install seat belts on every school bus, Walker wrote.

A couple in Gilroy, Calif., will not let their daughter attend any field trips “where riding the school bus is required for participation,” they wrote in a letter signed “the Webers” to the Gilroy Dispatch. “We know our children are safer seat-belted in our private vehicles,” they wrote, “yet insisting on safety for our precious children has resulted in being banned from the field trips.”

But seat belts might actually create more danger for children, Jim Fey, with bus company Student Transit Eau Claire, told WEAU-TV, a western Wisconsin television station. "Maybe it would be used as a weapon,” Fey said, “where they could take that seat belt and whap someone else with the buckle itself.” Another concern, he said, is that seat belts could make emergency evacuations more difficult.

A passenger on the school bus caught on the Interstate 35W bridge during the collapse, Julie Graves, told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that seat belts would have been a great hindrance when trying to evacuate the children. Without seat belts, she said, "they got out real quick.”

A former school bus driver, Judy Best, wrote a letter to the Star Tribune suggesting alternatives to seat belts that may increase bus safety. “Turn the seats around to face the rear,” she wrote. “Raise the seat height to prevent whiplash. That would reduce injuries because the impact force would be absorbed by the seats.” Seat belts, she wrote, would be used as weapons or they would not be used at all.

But the Minnesota Legislature has shown few signs of introducing changes to bus safety laws in the near future.

Sen. Rick Olseen, co-chairman of a legislative committee on student transportation, told the St. Paul Pioneer Press he does not expect any proposals until after the investigation of the crash has been completed. "I've been working closely with the State Patrol and I think we need to let them figure out what happened here,” said the DFL senator from Harris.

Another issue associated with the crash has dwarfed bus safety on lawmakers’ agendas: illegal immigration. The driver of the van that collided with the school bus in Cottonwood is an undocumented woman from Guatemala who gave authorities a false name and Social Security number.

"It’s absolutely wrong in the state of Minnesota to allow cities to look the other way in terms of law enforcement when it comes to harboring illegal immigration," House minority leader Marty Seifert, R-Marshall, told 5 Eyewitness News.