HAYS COUNTY, Texas — The Hays Consolidated Independent School District has set in motion plans to make sure all of their school buses will have seat belts.
The proposal comes after parents raised concerns about safety following the deadly school bus rollover crash that killed 5-year-old Ulises Rodriguez Montoya and 33-year-old Ryan Wallace, who was driving in the vehicle behind the bus. Many other passengers were seriously injured.
The incident occurred on March 22 when the bus was returning from a field trip to the Bastrop Zoo carrying 44 pre-K students and 11 adults. A concrete truck crossed the double yellow line and struck the school bus head-on, causing it to roll over.
The bus was not equipped with seat belts, which caused community members to raise concerns about safety. The district responded to those concerns with a five-part plan to either purchase new school buses or refit the current ones with seat belts.
“We may never know for sure if a seatbelt on the school bus would have made a difference for Ulises. But, if there is even a chance that it would have done so, Hays CISD must do more than is required. And, we will,” Hays CISD officials said in a seat belt proposal published Friday.
The district points out in the proposal that Texas law requires all school buses purchased after 2017 to be equipped with seat belts and says it is in compliance with the law.
According to the proposal, all special education and most regular school bus routes have buses with seat belts assigned to them. The district said 15 of the 72 regular education route buses did not have seat belts. In its support bus fleet, about 87 of the 107 buses do not have seat belts.
The district says that by April 30 all regular route buses will have seat belts.
The proposal says, on average, a new school bus costs about $160,000 and adding seat belts to buses made between 2012 and 2017 costs about $36,000 each. The current turnaround time for purchasing a new school bus is about a year, and the district is waiting on 15 new buses to arrive some time in the future.
The parts of the proposal that still need funding add up to about $8.8 million. This includes retrofitting 13 older school buses with seat belts and purchasing over 35 additional buses.
Voters in the district already approved a Hays CISD bond measure that allowed for the purchase of nine 2025 model buses, but the proposal is recommending adding to that purchase 21 more buses, which will need to be approved by the school board.
The final part of the proposal includes making the purchase of at least 22 school buses to add to the support fleet as part of a bond proposal that would be put to the voters in May 2025. That is estimated to cost at least $3.6 million.
The National Transportation Safety Board is also investigating the crash for the purpose of understanding safety features in the vehicles involved in the crash and determining potential improvements.
Since the crash, criminal and civil cases have been filed against the driver of the concrete truck, Jerry Hernandez, who told investigators he had ingested illicit substances the night before and day of the crash. Hernandez, who had an extensive criminal history prior to the crash, was charged with criminally negligent homicide.
The civil lawsuit against Hernandez and the concrete company who hired him was brought forward by a teacher in the district, who was on the bus when it crashed and suffered at least four broken bones in her back.
The families affected by the crash have received an outpouring of support from the Hays CISD community, with a GoFundMe being set up to help cover any medical or other expenses. So far, it has raised $102,051, well over its goal of $100,000.