Sans legislation, state agency promotes booster seat use for South Dakota youths

By Mary Garrigan, Journal staff | Thursday, December 04, 2008

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South Dakota is one of 29 states that does not have a booster seat law for children through age 7, and the National Safety Transportation Board would like the state to change that.

"In a perfect world, that would be nice," said James Carpenter, director of Office of Highway Safety for the South Dakota Department of Public Safety.

But Carpenter's agency does not plan to promote any booster seat legislation in the 2009 state Legislature. Instead, it will continue its Project 8 public education campaign and work to enforce current seat belt and child restraint laws in South Dakota, which require that all children younger than 5 and weighing less than 40 pounds be secured in an approved child safety seat. Any child over those ages and weight limits can be placed in only a seat belt while a passenger in a vehicle.

Project 8 is a federally-funded state program that will spend $338,000 to provide 3,300 free child car seats and booster seats to low-income South Dakota families during the current fiscal year. Project 8 takes its name from the recommendation that kids up to age 8 and up to 80 pounds are safest when using a booster seat.

Seat belts are designed to fit adults, and there is no way to safely restrain young children in them, according to Kathy Deml, a certified child passenger safety technician and Project 8 regional coordinator in Rapid City.

"Seat belts just don't fit kids. Children can get some serious internal injuries from them," Deml said.

The NTSB agrees and has put its child restraint recommendations on its Most Wanted safety improvement list for the past 12 years. The NTSB recommends that children up to the age of 8 be required to use child restraint systems and booster seats. It issued the list again recently in time for the holiday travel season and said all that is needed is the political will to push for tougher safety laws for children.

"Our goal is to get children properly buckled up," NTSB board member Debbie Hersman said during a recent news conference. "We ask those states to make it theirs."

In 2007, Gov. Mike Rounds vetoed a booster seat law that would have required children ages 5, 6 and 7 to be in booster seats unless they weighed more than 80 pounds. He called the law unworkable and unenforceable, and lawmakers failed to override the veto.

South Dakota Voices for Children executive director Susan Randall said her group won't sponsor any new booster seat legislation again until Rounds is out of office because there is no indication that he has changed his position.

"Because Rounds is still in office, we didn't see any point in reintroducing the legislation. There's no point in fighting that battle until we have a governor that's willing to look at safety for kids in those ages," she said.

States have passed a hodgepodge of child restraint laws, and 43 states and the District of Columbia require some use of booster seats, although only 21 states require them up through the age of 7. In 2008, three states (Massachusetts, Michigan and Utah) enacted child restraint laws to fully implement this recommendation; Maryland upgraded its existing law to fully implement the recommendation. Kentucky and Mississippi enacted child restraint laws covering children up to age 7, but the NTSB is still awaiting action by 29 states to fully implement this recommendation.

From 1998 through 2007, more than 3,500 child passengers ages 4 to 8 died in U.S. traffic crashes, about half of whom were unrestrained. Most of the remaining child fatalities were improperly restrained in a belt designed for adults.

So far this year, South Dakota's lone child traffic death occurred July 18 in a crash near Mitchell. The 5-month-old child was not restrained in a child safety seat and was ejected from the vehicle. There also was one child fatality in 2007 in South Dakota. In that accident, the child restraint was improperly used.

Since 1984, when South Dakota passed it first child passenger restraint law, 54 children younger than 5 have died in motor vehicle accidents. Of those, five were in a properly used child restraint seat, and two were restrained by a lap belt only. No deaths have been reported where a lap and shoulder harness were used to restrain a child.

In 2007, 76 children younger than 5 were injured in car accidents in the state, and 63 of those were restrained in some way. In nine cases, no safety equipment was used.

Carpenter recognizes that the use of booster seats through age 7 is ideal but said that more lives could be saved in South Dakota through greater compliance with the current seat belt and child restraint laws.

He noted that none of the five people killed in the state during this year's Thanksgiving holiday wore seat belts.

"If we all adhered to the existing laws we have, we'd save lives," Carpenter said. "We have the laws that would do it."