Ryan Gray | Senior Editor

WC19 wheelchair: A crash-tested wheelchair with four clearly identified securement points that meets the design and performance requirements of ANSI-RESNA WC19 Wheelchairs Used as Seats in Motor Vehicles, and is sometimes called a transit wheelchair.

Over the past seven years, quietly so it seems, the voluntary WC19 standard recommendation has been widely implemented by wheelchair manufacturers to construct their products as transportation seats, resulting in increased safety for students with special needs transported each day in school buses.

But what does WC19 mean to school bus transporters? Precisely, “Does your school district train its drivers on knowledge and understanding of WC 19?”

Far be it from a scientific poll, but a School Transportation News survey with 200 Web users participating as of this writing, asked that very question. A whopping 80 percent of readers responded with a telling question of their own: “What is WC19?”

Meanwhile, only 10 percent were able to answer in the affirmative, and 8 percent said their school district provides no such training. Another 3 percent were unsure. The survey continues through this month at www.stnonline.com.

A case in point for the U.S. Department of Education National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research’s (NIDRR) continued funding for an additional five years of the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Wheelchair Transportation Safety (RERC WTS), which was first established a year after the publication of WC19 in May of 2000 by the American National Standards Institute/Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (ANSI/RESNA). The RERC WTS is collaborating with the National Congress on School Transportation, which drove the development of WC19 in 1995 for a 30 mph, front-impact wheelchair crash test.

As RERC WTS researchers attempt to get their arms around the subject of training, additional safety improvements are already in the works. Dr. Larry Schneider, director of the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute’s (UMTRI) Biosciences Division and the new RERC WTS director, said RESNA’s Committee on Wheelchairs and Transportation (COWHAT) is working on adding a WC20 requirement that will independently crash test the wheelchair seating systems. He added that researchers are also considering rear-impact collision tests in addition to the industry standard frontal-impact sled tests.

The RERC WTS survey of school transportation drivers and state directors won’t kick in until 2009, but researchers are already reaching out to state directors of pupil transportation and individual school district bus drivers to prepare a gauge of the industry’s implementation and understanding of WC19.

“We don’t have a sense of what knowledge is out there,” said Tricia Karg, a mechanical and bioengineering researcher at the University of Pittsburgh and associate director of the RERC WTS. She is also co-investigator of the pending study on school transportation with Mary Ellen Buning, an occupational therapist and assistive technology practitioner at the University of Colorado, Denver Health Sciences Center’s Department of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation.

“Some state directors have policies that describe how those (special needs) students are to be transported, how to get them on the bus,” said Buning, explaining the hurdles set before her and Karg. “Other state directors have little or no mention of this issue. It’s difficult to find out how things are going.”

“It’s getting the information on knowledge level,” Karg added. “Hopefully we’re getting information out to impact safety. We’re interested in finding out the knowledge of WC19 that is out there, but there’s another aspect. We’re just as interested in what policies and what practices are out there.”

For starters, researchers have been unable to determine an exact number of special-needs students who utilize wheelchairs on school buses because most states do not collect such data. There are also questions as to what school bus drivers and attendants know — and don’t know — regarding wheelchair securement and occupant restraint procedures.

For example, Schneider said it should never be left to drivers to figure out the best wheelchair tie-down spots. This should be performed only by school transportation professionals and the spots should be clearly marked as such.

“There are all different styles of manual and power wheelchairs, which creates the need for a variety of tie-down methods,” said Sue Shutrump, supervisor of occupational and physical therapy services with the Trumbull County, Ohio, ESC. “It’s really difficult to get driver consistency.”

Schneider said the true design of the RERC WTS survey is to see what impact if any WC19 has had on the school transportation industry, specifically on special needs operations, and beyond. Wheelchair manufacturers like Convaid, Invacare and Sunrise currently test their products to WC19 standards. But the general lack of WC19 knowledge by pupil transporters, parents and occupational and physical therapists could lead to manufacturers discontinuing their WC19 compliance because of a lack of market demand. More than anything, the RERC WTS looks at the study as an educational outreach vehicle to keep the safety issue at the forefront and to increase knowledge about WC19 wheelchairs.

“It’s getting those key groups, including consumers, to know about WC19 wheelchairs and to understand the benefits,” Schneider said. “One of the biggest problems we face, and one of the main goals of our RERC, is getting the word out. We need to remind people about the RideSafe brochure and the travelsafer.org Web site where it is located. It has basic information on how to secure wheelchairs and restrain their occupants. We’ve got to do a better job spreading the word.”

Source: School Transportation News, February 2007. All rights reserved.