rule are made for students who live in high-crime areas and for students who live near the residences of known pedophiles. He also said the RFID badges help the district track special needs students
throughout the day. “They might go somewhere else during the day for special training,” Wilcots said. “So, they might be at another facility when we pick them up.” Other technologies employed by Houston include a parent app through
Z-Pass, which allows parents to track the pick-up and drop-off points for their children. Then there is an app called SafeStop, which helps parents who wish to track the progress of their child’s bus along its route. For the bus performance itself, Houston also features telematics through
Zonar Systems, which provide real-time diagnostic information to techni- cians at the bus garage.
Small Districts Have Big Challenges, Too Katrina Falk, assistant transportation director at the 1,100 student Shelby Eastern School Corporation located about 20 miles east of Indianapolis, recently won a Gold Award from Zonar. Her winning submission to the Zonar Systems All Star Awards contest was called “Telematics and Efficiency for the Small School District.” “Even though we are a relatively small school bus corporation with 18 bus
routes, we felt there was a need to include GPS in the grand scheme of the technology that we’ve been adding in our office,” Falk explained. “We cur- rently use Transfinder for our routing needs. But without the GPS, we would have no way of verifying how our routes were playing out in the real world.” Similar to Houston ISD, Falk said the GPS lets her district know whether buses are staying on their routes—or if certain bus stops are even still nec- essary. “We still have some long routes, but now I’ve learned that some of the stops were not being utilized, or were being underutilized,” Falk said. “Moving into this school year,” Falk recalled, “we were faced with having to
reroute half of our bus routes. But being able to pull the real-time data from the Zonar GPS and use that information to build more efficient routes with Transfinder, worked really well for us. We would have had to ride the routes to get the same data, but this [technology] put that data at our fingertips.” Falk said the district contracts with owner/operator bus drivers. Prior to this school year, Shelby Eastern paid the drivers based on estimates of a “broad area” they might cover on a route. “Since implementing Zonar, we were able to change that [inexact] process,
so now they are getting paid by the mile,” Falk said. “The accuracy of their routes is now spot-on, rather than an estimate of a broad coverage area. If they have a route alteration, such as a detour, or we’ve added a student to their route, I am able to pull that up and compensate them for any extra miles traveled.” Falk added that the software enabled the school corporation to save up- wards of $40,000 annually, but the benefits are more than financial. “It has
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