SPECIAL REPORT
Working Together in
Unison School districts and different tech vendors partner to merge technologies for more seamless operations
Written by Debbie Curtis
I
n a world where we can track a pizza or an Uber, many parents expect information about their child’s bus to be instantly available. Transportation direc- tors nationwide who are trying to keep pace with
constantly arriving new technologies, are often hard pressed to find cost-effective solutions that work togeth- er. For example, most fleets have buses of different ages, an issue that presents additional challenges to merge those technologies. Terry Penn, director of transportation for Rockwall ISD that serves a county located northeast of Dallas, explained how hardware and software vendors are partnering to offer total solutions. The vendors want the technologies to integrate easily with existing platforms. “Electronics on older buses weren’t designed with
the forethought of adapting additional components,” he stressed. “An older bus might not have the electrical system set up to easily tie into and draw the current that is needed for newer components. Someday, I hope that there is a fully compatible bus that comes from the factory that will plug and play the Wi-Fi and whatever software you want.” He admitted that such seamless integration will un-
doubtedly increase the base cost of purchasing a new school bus, but it is what society now demands. “The district I work for is near Dallas, which has an
affluent, growing economy. Our parents have high ex- pectations. They want this technology,” he explained. With school districts faced with the ever-increasing
24 School Transportation News • NOVEMBER 2019
complexity of school bus technology, more and more vendors are providing agnostic solutions. For exam- ple, Transfinder and Seon work closely in Rockwall ISD to integrate routing and GPS. Likewise, Mecklenburg County Public Schools in North Carolina requires a similar relationship between Transfinder and Zonar. The partnership is in its fourth year. The next step, said Mecklenburg County Transportation
Director Bill Mayhew, is to implement Transfinder’s new parent-facing app, Stopfinder, to provide school bus arrival times and locations. “On the first day of school, two secretaries and I handled over 250 phone calls,” he noted. “If parents can get their answers with an app on their phone, it saves us a lot of work.” “Our strategy is to become more device agnostic, mak-
ing it easier for our customers to bring other partners into our ecosystem,” commented Dan Clem, Zonar’s pu- pil product manager. One example is Zonar’s third-party tablet, the Samsung Tab Active 2, which Clem said allows the company to bring on more partner applications and to communicate with other hardware devices in the fu- ture. This could include other video security and routing providers.
School bus vendors now also offer application pro- gramming interfaces (APIs), which make data available to other service providers, and available to customers to generate their own reports or other applications. For example, Zonar telematics data interfaces with the existing program that is used for parts inventory or data
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