On April 28, a Boston Public Schools bus struck and killed a 5-year-old student, Lens A. Joseph. The bus had just dropped Joseph off near his home in Hyde Park, after previously hitting two parked cars in Mattapan and fleeing that scene.
The bus driver, Jean Charles, has since resigned ahead of a scheduled termination hearing. On the day of the crash, he had an expired state-required certification.
Fatal crashes involving school buses are unusual, particularly with so young a victim. However, they are not unheard of: state data show 19 prior fatal school bus crashes in Massachusetts over the past decade. Two of them, in 2019 and 2021, were in Boston.
Emily Stein, executive director of the advocacy and awareness group Safe Roads Alliance, said her group largely has the same messages for all drivers — don’t speed or drive distracted — but they’re even more important for bus drivers.
“The responsibility is multiplied because of all the kids in the back,’’ Stein said. “You are in charge of the lives of every child on this bus, but you’re also modeling behavior, because the kids are going to watch.’’
These data come from the state’s Department of Transportation IMPACT dashboard, based on reports from police agencies. Crashes from 2022 forward may be added, updated, or deleted due to corrections or new information. The Department of Transportation cautions that the dashboard may include errors or be missing crashes. Still, it is the most comprehensive source available on Massachusetts crashes.
The measure in the data for school buses only checks whether a school bus was involved, meaning the buses’ involvement could be relatively minor.
Except for the depths of the pandemic when many schools were closed, Massachusetts has more than 1,500 crashes involving school buses per year, and at least 15,000 in the past decade. About one-fifth resulted in injuries, and there were 19 total fatal crashes from 2015 to 2024. The database’s most recent fatal crashes involving school buses were in 2023.
For the most part, the frequency of school bus crashes is related to population, with Massachusetts’ three biggest cities being three of the five most frequent sites over the past decade. But New Bedford, a smaller city, had the most crashes, nearly 900, and Boston, the largest city, ranked fifth with 442.
Lowell, Worcester, and Springfield each had more than 600 bus crashes.
Stein emphasized the role of road design in many crashes — although the biggest factor in Lens’s death may have been the driver.
“Instead of looking at one particular aspect of [road safety], you have to look at the whole system,’’ Stein said. “What could the driver have done differently? What was the road design infrastructure? Could it have been changed to make it safer?’’
For large vehicles like school buses, it is also important to ensure there are mirrors and cameras to prevent blind spots, Stein added, including on the exterior front.
“If there was a camera on the bus, would the driver have seen him?’’ she asked, referring to Lens.
Only a small minority of bus-involved crashes also involve pedestrians, according to the state data, ranging from 11 such crashes in 2021 to 28 in 2017. Most years, Boston reports one or two crashes involving both a pedestrian and a school bus.
Pedestrian-involved crashes are very dangerous: more than 80 percent result in injuries. Over the past decade, five resulted in deaths.
Stein touted a recently-passed law that allows school bus cameras to record vehicles that don’t stop for buses with their stop arms extended, which is dangerous for children getting on and off the bus.
In Boston specifically, school bus-involved crashes are less common than early in the century, when there were sometimes more than 100 each year, but 2024 had the most such crashes since 2008, 67.
Overall, the city had seven fatalities in bus-involved crashes from 2002 to 2024.
The state database does not include information on which school district is responsible for the buses, meaning its chart does not reflect annual Boston Public Schools-related crashes. Boston school buses, for example, often pass through Brookline transporting students between Allston/Brighton and other parts of the city, and private schools and visiting athletic teams from other districts bus students within Boston.
Over the past decade, Boston’s school bus crashes have been concentrated in Dorchester, Roxbury, and the center of the city, unsurprisingly given that more buses cross those areas ferrying students around the city. Fewer were reported in outlying areas such as Hyde Park and East Boston.
Prior to April’s Hyde Park crash, the last fatal bus crash in Boston was in Mattapan in 2021.
Christopher Huffaker can be reached at christopher.huffaker @globe.com. Follow him @huffakingit.
