Rick Klaus, vice president of sales at
Durham School Services, agrees that the better the technology, the more attractive the contractor. “School districts are typically behind
in the implementation of technology,” says Klaus. “We have had a great deal of success using GPS to reduce costs. We’re putting GPS on all our buses.” Antonio Civitella, president and CEO
of Transfinder, a provider of student transportation management systems and services, also says contractors are viewing GIS technology as an opportunity to be more efficient and get more business. He adds that GIS is also a valuable spatial anal- ysis tool. By zeroing in on a specific area on the map, operators can access all the data in that area, such as the number of homes, street information or hazard zones. “GIS is a very specific spatial database
and that’s very important. You can make intelligent, informed decisions based on solid information,” Civitella says.
Seeing is Believing Te value of being able to see the lo-
cation of a school bus in a potential emergency situation cannot be overstat- ed. In June 2011 Duplin County (N.C.) Schools Transportation Director Jeff Tig- pen received a call from a parent inquiring why her child’s bus was late. Tigpen im- mediately got on the radio to the bus driver, who told him she was having chest pains. With 43 kids on the bus, Tigpen was taking no chances on the health of the driver or the safety of the kids. He told her to pull to the side of the road and he would send help. “I looked the bus up on GPS, and when
we got there we found out it was not chest pains,” he says. “She was intoxicated.” At that point, the district had used the
technology less than two months. Tigpen said the district purchased the technology primarily for savings and efficiency, but lo- cating stray buses is a collateral benefit he will take. “GPS is a good thing to have,” he says.
“You can track a bus on a screen, and you can’t put a price on that. In this world nowadays, the more tools you have, the better off you are.” Armando Cuellar,
transportation su- pervisor for the Madison Public Schools in
www.stnonline.com 47
Phoenix, is still breaking in his GPS tech- nology, but agrees that the GIS mapping aspect is invaluable. “We wanted a system that could tell us
where the buses were and what they were doing,” Cuellar says. “We can see their location and speed. We’re in the process of making the routes more efficient and keeping the drivers on task. Another ad- vantage is, if something were to happen,
I would know exactly where that bus is all the time.” Student transportation is just one ap-
plication for GIS mapping technology, according to Kerry Somerville, business development manager for U.S. Comput- ing, a provider of GIS-based solutions. Somerville says GIS is itself a vehicle that can take school districts anywhere they want to go.
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