Meeting of Minds
the
Eric Brown and Colleen Murphy-Penk conducting a pre-trip inspection.
off. For example, New London Public Schools in Con- necticut took to Twitter last month to announce the ability to download the free Safe Stop app to know the location of their children’s bus. Tim Shannon is the director of transportation services for Twin Rivers Unified School District in Sacramento, California. He says he fails to see how technology and its integration is anything but helpful. “I see the technology as a very powerful tool to assist in managing many aspects of the transportation operation,” says Shannon. “Let’s look at GPS (and) routing software. It allows us to see the location of the bus and where it was driven. We are able to match how the route was written to how it was driven. We also use it to verify on time busing.” Twin Rivers also completed a pilot test last school year on RFID bus passes, and the district is rolling it out this month to include all students. “It will be a universal card that contains a bar code, QR code and RFID this will support all of our various systems throughout the district,” he explains.
Like most others, Shannon says he sees technology bringing many advantages to all involved in pupil trans- portation. “We are also supplying parents with an app that allows them to track the school bus for arrival times and their child,” he says. “Our school sites will have an arrival board system like at an airport to see the location of the bus. We have been using for the past three years four cam- era video systems in all of our buses and have a live feed. The video systems are used for bus safety for the students and the drivers.”
MORE DATA Where there’s more technology, there’s more data. Technology, particularly that which utilizes the Internet of Things (IoT), delivers data in drives. Such data can be a blessing or a curse, depending on the school district’s ability to embrace it and translate it into useful informa- tion that may help drive decisions about the operation of a bus fleet. “The data that results from this technology can be used
48 School Transportation News • SEPTEMBER 2017
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