A comparison of Texas school-crash records found a gap between what nine Houston-area districts reported to the Texas Education Agency and crashes recorded by law enforcement within those districts’ boundaries. The districts reported no school bus crashes for at least two of the past three school years, while state crash data logged 214 crashes in those same areas during that span.
The discrepancy comes from an investigation by KHOU 11, which compared districts' submissions to the TEA's Bus Accident Reporting System against police reports filed with the Texas Department of Transportation's Crash Records Information System. That state database includes every bus crash logged by law enforcement, whether or not students were aboard at the time, the station reports. Nine districts across the Houston area reported no bus crashes to TEA for at least two of three school years even as the parallel police data recorded 214 crashes inside their boundaries during the same period.
KHOU 11 reported that one of the crashes was fatal. In April 2023, a Katy ISD bus and a Jeep collided at the intersection of Morton Road and Dulaney Road near Katy, and the Jeep’s driver did not survive. The crash also left a student with a leg injury that her father, Garcia, said ended her high school cheerleading and volleyball career.
Districts Respond After Being Questioned
After KHOU 11 asked the nine districts about the gaps in their reporting, five acknowledged mistakes and pledged proper reporting going forward, per the same account. Katy ISD told the station that beginning in the 2025-2026 school year, it started submitting all applicable bus accidents to the TEA regardless of fault.
Barbers Hill ISD attributed its missing submissions to a previous transportation director who failed to file the required bus accident reports with the TEA. Not every district was willing to explain itself: Stafford Municipal School District declined to comment, and Galena Park ISD did not respond to multiple email requests for comment, the station's report notes.
A Statewide Pattern, Not Just a Houston Problem
The Houston-area findings fit into a broader statewide pattern of incomplete bus crash reporting. Nineteen percent of Texas school districts and charter schools failed to report details on school bus crashes for the 2022-23 school year, according to a KXAN analysis of a TEA report that identified 233 districts and charters statewide that did not report data that year. That year's statewide data showed no Texas students died in school bus crashes, though six were seriously injured, and 34 students who were not wearing seatbelts were hurt in bus crashes.
Houston ISD has faced similar scrutiny before. The district did not report bus-accident numbers in four of five years, and the one year it did report showed 17 accidents, even though law-enforcement data showed more than 500 school bus accidents occurred within HISD's boundaries during that time, according to the Houston Chronicle. Aldine ISD, meanwhile, did not file any Bus Accident Reporting System data for the 2020-21 school year and reported just 129 bus accidents over the prior five years, even as law-enforcement data recorded more than twice as many crashes in the district over that same span. Across all of Harris County, the Chronicle found, CRIS data logged 2,822 school bus accidents since 2017 compared with just 1,584 recorded in the state's BARS system.
Why the Numbers Diverge
Part of the gap traces back to how the TEA's own rules are written. Agency guidance states that if an accident involved a citation for either party, a district or charter school must report it to the state; for accidents without a citation, reporting is left to the district's discretion, according to the Texas Education Agency.
The inconsistency isn't new. A 2015 Houston Chronicle report found that some districts interpreted the state's reporting questions to mean they should log every accident, while others reported only crashes that resulted in citations, producing data that was misleading and incomplete. That same year, nearly 200 Texas districts and charter school operators, about 16 percent statewide, did not submit the mandatory bus-accident data at all. Reports filed between the 2008-09 and 2013-14 school years listed zero fatalities among student or adult bus passengers, but recorded three bus-driver deaths and 11 pedestrian deaths over that six-year stretch.
What the records and rules show
CRIS is not a count of every incident involving a bus. TxDOT’s crash-reporting instructions say a reportable traffic crash must involve at least one motor vehicle in transport; submitting reports on certain non-reportable crashes investigated on private roads, driveways or parking lots is not mandatory. TxDOT also cautions that assigning a crash to a geographic jurisdiction indicates only where it occurred—not that the jurisdiction was responsible for it or could have prevented it.
For now, the Texas Education Agency's most recent guidance to districts, issued in 2025, instructs schools to select an appropriate response if they had no bus services or no collisions during the school year before being routed to the end of the reporting survey. Whether that process closes the gap KHOU 11 uncovered in the Houston area remains to be seen as districts like Katy ISD adjust their reporting practices heading into the new school year.
