The yearslong national debate about whether seat belts should be installed in school buses was revived Monday after a fatal accident involving a school bus in Liberty, Mo.

The wreck left some children critically injured, but a Lawrence official said studies showed students were actually safer in buses that didn’t have seat belts.

“If I thought that putting seat belts in a school bus would decrease the number of deaths nationally on average, I’d be all for it,” said Wayne Zachary, who’s in charge of driver development and safety for Laidlaw Education Services, the company that provides transportation for the Lawrence school district. “I personally don’t believe it would change anything. There might even be cases where the seat belt could lead to a death or a more serious injury.”

The accident in Liberty happened about 8:30 a.m. Monday, when a school bus carrying 53 children slammed into two vehicles as it approached an intersection.

The crash killed the only two people in the cars. Liberty Police Chief Craig Knouse identified the victims as David Gleason, Liberty, and David Sandweiss, whose hometown was not immediately available. Their ages were not released.

Life-threatening injuries

Investigators said they didn’t know why the bus suddenly veered into the cars, which were waiting for a stoplight to change in the community about 15 miles north of Kansas City.

Twenty-three elementary school students were taken to area hospitals, and at least three of them had life-threatening injuries. Some of the children suffered head injuries, cuts, scrapes, broken bones and neck injuries, said Laura Fitzmaurice, head of the emergency department at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City. Many were bleeding and crying for their parents.

“One little boy had his teeth knocked out, and he asked me if he was going to be deformed,” said a shaken Vickie Whattoff, one of about 20 workers from a nearby Hy-Vee grocery store who responded to the accident. “We saw that it was a bus and ran over and started helping kids out.”

Lilee Mathews, 7, is comforted by her dad, Christian Mathews, after being treated for a fractured right elbow. Lilee was injured Monday in a school bus crash that killed two adults in Liberty, Mo.

“Why don’t they have safety belts on school buses?” asked Whattoff, a customer service manager whose blue work shirt was smeared with small streaks of blood. “A lot of the injuries were from kids flying forward and hitting the seat in front of them.”

But the injuries were a tragedy that seat belts likely would not have helped prevent, Zachary said.

With the exception of Laidlaw’s smaller-capacity buses that are generally used to transport students with special needs, the company’s vehicles do not have safety restraints.

Zachary said ample research showed they simply weren’t needed.

“In the bigger buses, the seats are a little tighter,” Zachary said. “There are higher seat backs, more padding and it helps protect them, keeps them in this little safety cushion or safety zone in the event of an impact.”

Laidlaw has a five-year contract with the Lawrence school district to provide transportation for students between home and school.

‘No public outcry’

Officials with the school district could ask Laidlaw to install seat belts in the buses that transport their students. It would be negotiated as part of the contract when it’s up for renewal in 2006, Zachary said.

But chances of that happening are slim.

6News video: Bus accident raises seat belt question

“We’ve heard no public outcry for seat belts,” said Rick Gammill, director of special operations, safety and transportation for the Lawrence school district. “We get maybe two phone calls like that a year, and when we do, we just cite research: Compartmentalization on buses is safe or safer than seat belts.”

Zachary said studies showed that students who wore lap-belt safety restraints in school buses generally wore them too low, causing more head and neck injuries upon impact, or too high, causing abdominal or pelvic injuries.

“Realistically, if parents are genuinely concerned, they’d probably be better off to instruct and help train their children to behave themselves, to sit properly on a school bus, than worry about the seat belt issue. Sometimes the noise, the misbehavior, the goings-on on the bus alone could be more of a safety concern than not having seat belts, in my opinion,” Zachary said.

The National Coalition for School Bus Safety, PTA and other groups have advocated for seat belts on all new school buses, saying studies done by the government and others are misleading or based on faulty data.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.