A seat belt pilot study group commissioned by Gov. Bob Riley’s following the fatal 2006 Huntsville school bus crash is looking to release its findings by the end of September, according to research team's principal investigator.

After almost three years of combined efforts and hard work, the school bus seat belt study is in the final stages, and the industry is eagerly awaiting the final results.

“My excitement is tempered by the fact that we have six of the 10 reports ready and its a headlong dash to the finish line at the moment,” said Dr. Dan Turner, professor of civil engineering at the University of Alabama’s University Transportation Center for Alabama (UTCA), which was awarded the study in 2007.

After the reports are completed on the 12 buses at 10 different school districts around the state, the governor’s group and the state department of education will be briefed on the findings. Dr. Turner and his team will hold a press conference and post the completed reports online for the public to view.

Although he said he plans on attending industry conferences after the study is released, Dr. Turner has been accompanied by Joe Lightsey, state director of transportation at the Alabama State Department of Education, and Jay K. Lindley, director of the UTCA, at state and regional conferences over the last few months to share preliminary results.

“My briefings have been primarily to identify confounding and conflicting issues involved in a decision, all the considerations, and to ask for input and to tell them what we’ve found so far,” said Dr. Turner. “We’ve had positive responses from attendees.”

For example, Dr. Turner described a sample of 30 percent of Alabama’s school buses. The team carefully screened the data and then theoretically loaded actual busloads of students into buses with different configurations of seats and bus types to predict how many additional buses the state might have to purchase with any type of configuration. And, according to Dr. Turner, the numbers have been pretty reasonable. But real life does not always follow the same parameters when using raw data.

“We feel good about our tentative numbers. We call them tentative numbers because the first bus out could be carrying the football team to a game and of course this would be an exception to the number of students that would fit,” added Dr. Turner.