Eighteen preschool children, their teacher and their bus driver were killed in the Chinese province of Gansu when the school bus they were riding on had a head-on collision with a truck at 9:40 a.m. on Wednesday.

Policemen (L) inspect a school bus and a truck which collided as rescuers pull out a body at a traffic accident site in Yulinzi township of Zhengning county, Gansu province, November 16, 2011. Nineteen people, including 17 preschoolers and two adults, died in the head-on collision between the two vehicles in northwest China's Gansu province Wednesday morning. The local government has blamed overloading for the crash as the nine-seater school bus was carrying 64 people, Xinhua News Agency reported. REUTERS/China Daily

The children had been on their way to the Little Doctor Kindergarten in Qingyang. The Little Doctor Kindergarten was said to cater to children who came from rural farming families, according to MSNBC.

The bus driver and four of the preschool children died at the site of the crash. It was later revealed that the teacher and more preschool children had died and that 44 other children were hospitalized with serious to critical injuries, according to Gao Shaobo, the Zhengning county head of traffic police. "The van was driving on the wrong side of the street. Both the truck and the van were going at high speeds at the time," he was quoted as saying to the Associated Press.

Although the bus only had nine seats, 62 children along with the two adults had been forced to ride in the minibus, said Fan, the director of the emergency office of the Gansu provincial work safety bureau.

The official Xinhua News Agency attributed the crash to the overloading of the school bus. It seems that overcrowding and traffic accidents are common occurrences in China.

Causing outrage in China, the people used their microblogs to focus on the failure of the Chinese public educational system to properly serve students living rural areas. Over eight hundred thousand posts had been uploaded just a few hours after the crash occurred, according to The New York Times.

Most of the bloggers urged the government to increase spending for school buses that could adequately protect the children and not put their lives in danger.

Recently, the Chinese government ramped up their efforts to improve the public educational system and budgeted almost three hundred billion yuan for it. However, this has not seemed to reach the rural areas, where schools don't receive enough funds to adequately educate the students and to pay the teachers.