HEADLINES
Texas School District to Track Special Needs Students via RFID Cards
By Art Gissendaner Increasing student safety and state funding are the motivations
behind a pilot project at Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas, that will use student locator technology to more accurately account for 2,000 special needs students who ride district buses daily. Te district will use the Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
system to electronically document the number of students with special needs who ride the buses to further ensure the accuracy of the count and check that the children are where they should be. NISD spokesman Pascual Gonzalez said monitoring the trans-
portation of special needs students is part of a larger year-long pilot project, where the district will track students at two of its schools by embedding the RFID chip in their ID cards to monitor attendance. Te district receives state funding based on average daily attendance and Medicaid funds for the number of special needs students it transports. He said the chips will work only when students are at school or
on the buses. Te information will be automatically transmitted to a computer where it will be processed and sent electronically to the appropriate state agency. Tat information is currently re- corded by hand. “Te documentation for school attendance and for transpor-
tation of special needs children currently is a manual process and very inefficient,” Gonzalez said. “We know we are not getting all of the revenues we should be getting from the state and Med- icaid because of the cumbersome manual documentation. Our plan is to see how student locator technology improves that.” NISD is the largest school district in Bexar County and fourth
largest in Texas, with 100,000 students attending 112 schools and 850 buses in its fleet. Two schools and 180 buses will participate in the pilot. “Tis is actually a small pilot for the size of our district,” Gon-
zalez said. “It will cost us about $500,000 to outfit those two schools and the 180 buses with the readers and the ID cards for the 6,000 students that will be affected by the pilot.” Gonzalez said the district is projecting the initial $500,000 investment will reap $1.9 million in additional reimbursement
28 School Transportation News Magazine August 2012
returns after one year, with the majority being Medicaid funds for transporting special needs students. “We expect about $135,000 from the state for attendance
management, but the vast majority of it will be the money to be realized from the special needs transportation reimbursement. It’s a well thought-out-plan that provides additional revenues to the school district that we are entitled to, but that we’ve not re- alized over the years because of a cumbersome documentation system. So we think this is a good thing.” Gonzalez said use of the student locator technology could be
expanded if the pilot is successful and income projections are met. Te district will also mount an intensive education cam- paign to familiarize parents with the worth of the technology and to address privacy concerns. “Our biggest challenge is communication with parents so they
fully understand,” he said. “Tis is not a big brother thing. It will enable us to locate kids at any time during the day.” He added that the district is 150 miles from the coast and has
experienced hurricanes and the occasional tornado. Evacuations and lock downs are two more reasons for increased accountability. “Parents may not like it until we can’t find their child during an
emergency,” he said. “We must know that all kids are accounted for.” Meanwhile, the district’s recent decision to sue Caterpillar and
a local dealer to recoup $3 million to replace 24 buses after one caught fire two years ago will have no impact on the decision to initiate the pilot program. “Tey are completely unrelated events,” Gonzalez said. “Tank
God there was nobody on that bus, but it sure was a visual event. As a result, 24 buses are sitting in the bus lot. In a district that grows by 3,000 students a year, that loss of service has a great impact.” He called the problem an “engine issue” that could not be
resolved. “We had several other issues with those engines that caused us to ground the fleet. Tey replaced the bus that caught fire with a different model and a different engine,” he continued. “We tried for two years to come to terms with Caterpillar and that was not successful.” ■
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