On March 3, 11-year-old Annaliese Backner of Parachute, who went by Anna, was running to catch her school bus, which had driven past her.

Backner tripped and fell under the bus and died at the scene.

Makayla Marie Strahle of Idaho Falls, Idaho was the same age as Anna back in 2011, when she was hit and killed by a motorist who ignored a school bus safety arm. 

Anna’s mom, Leandra, and Makayla’s dad, Dan Sperry, have showed up at the state Capitol in recent weeks to advocate for a school bus safety grant program sponsored by Sen. Don Coram, R-Montrose.

Senate Bill 85 creates the Safe Student Protection Program, which would provide grants to school districts, as well as contract with a program facilitator to improve student and school bus safety. The proposal, as envisioned, would equip a bus with a silent alarm and other technologies to protect the driver and the kids, such as cameras and crash detection. It would also help schools recruit and screen bus drivers, and train them on how to work with special needs students, danger zones, emergency escape procedures and anti-bullying tactics.  

For Coram, school bus safety has been a labor of love for several years, but it is an issue that has struggled to gain traction in the legislature.

Supporters of the bill note that while the legislature has invested millions in school safety that paid for security technology and resource officers, due in part to school shootings that took lives, school bus safety has taken the back seat – until now, or so they hope. 

The Senate State, Veterans and Military Affairs Committee approved the bill on Feb. 24, but not before gutting its $5.5 million in funding, making it eligible only for gifts, grants and donations. 

On that day, Anna was still alive, a sixth-grader at Grand Valley Elementary School. The bus driver was unaware he had hit a child, Coram said. Anna was little more than a block from home at the time, according to Leandra, her mother.

During the March debate on the state’s spending plan for the upcoming fiscal year, Coram and Sen. James Coleman, D-Denver, won approval for an amendment that would have restored the $5.5 million for the school bus safety program. But the amendment didn’t stay on the bill. 

In a letter to Senate President Steve Fenberg and Gov. Jared Polis, Sperry and Backner said had the bill been approved, Anna might still be alive. 

SB 85 sat in the Senate Appropriations Committee for more than two months, finally winning approval on Monday but with its funding reduced to $3.5 million. The bill cleared the Senate Tuesday on a 35-0 vote. It then won unanimous support Wednesday from the House Education Committee and now awaits approval from that chamber’s appropriations committee.

“We talk about safety in the school, school resource officers, locks on doors, but we neglect the safety of getting kids to school,” said Rep. Barbara McLachlan, D-Durango, adding that’s what SB 85 is for. 

While schools have modernized, school buses have changed little since he was a kid, added Rep. Marc Catlin, R-Montrose, who argued the system sorely needs an update.

Also under the legislation, for example, an app tied to the program would include an opt-in automatic notification to parents and guardians on where the child is, whether the child is walking to school, riding with a parent or on a school bus. 

Ward Leber, founder of the non-profit Child Safety Network, told the committee that Colorado would be the first state to launch the entire program, arguing the state would become the safest state in the nation in which to send kids to school. The program will reduce accidents and injuries, Leber said.

Sperry, who now lives in Idaho, called stop-arm violations a crisis and said there are more than 200,000 of those violations in Colorado each year. Every child who rides a school bus in Colorado likely witnesses one of those violations, he said. 

Sperry, now a detective in Idaho, was the first of the responders to the accident that took his daughter’s life, performing CPR on her. He later testified at the homicide trial of the motorist. Most of the incidents he has investigated as a school resource officer – more than a thousand of them – has been for stop-arm violations, he said, adding enforcement is difficult. He the most common excuse from drivers is they didn’t know they had to stop. 

Proper driver training increases safety for children, he said, adding he has trained 10,000 bus drivers and not one has lost a student. 

Since Makayla’s death, he and wife Melissa have made it their goal to ensure that every child arrives home alive, he said. 

Leandra, in a 9News report on April 6, said she can’t bring Anna back.

“But I can make it all not be for nothing,” she said.

“Do we have to wait for another tragedy before we understand the importance of passing this legislation?” Coram asked.

Should the bill be signed into law, it will be known as “Anna and Makayla’s law.”