SPECIAL REPORT
Luisa Brown created an informational video to introduce the Zillah County Schools community in Washington to the RFID card student ridership verification technology from Tyler Technologies. Watch the full video at
stnonline.com/go/nc.
district management applications.” In Brown’s case, integration was smooth, since she said she was already using Tyler’s routing software and Tyler Drive to connect with the RFID cards. But in Col- orado, Denver Public Schools (DPS) ran into challenges as transportation prepared to roll out student ridership technology last month for the first time. “Samsara has been a very willing and helpful part- ner in making sure all the components of our project roll-out smoothly and are operational internally,” said Tyler Maybee, director of operations for Denver’s trans- portation services, who said the district is creating an in-house student ridership technology solution with the GPS provider alongside a smaller technology company. “We have another vendor that is more of a barrier than opportunistic and has prevented our innovation from raising the bar within their own technology. It has forced us to find many workarounds and begin to search for a better partner that has a similar vision to fully integrate transportation technology.” With about 5,000 to 7,000 students being transported
response,” he said. “And then, secondly, we hear a lot of conversation about using the data to adjust capaci- ty to optimize routing. And I’ll be honest, I think in the second instance, people aren’t using it nearly as much as they’re talking about it. So, I think what directionally people would like to have [an answer to] is, how do we use the data to do useful things without having to have as much intervention on the part of either the students or us as the data managers?” Brown said she saw the potential benefits right away, especially from a routing standpoint. Time efficiency was a big concern for her, as she explained that collect- ing student ridership data required in Washington state would take too long for her and her drivers to verify the numbers by route and school. Ammon said the value of using technology to track
student ridership is knowing if ridership is growing and how that could lead to a proactive approach to acquir- ing more school buses or hiring more staff. Meanwhile, knowing if ridership is decreasing could mean needing to combine routes and reevaluate capacity and needs. “The integration of those things, which is not a sys- tems integration as much as it is an educational practice and structure integration to be able to think about, is why this is I think one of the things [that needs to be] talked about as student transportation management,” he shared. “I think this has much broader potential school
26 School Transportation News • SEPTEMBER 2025
daily across Denver, Maybee said time will tell the suc- cess of the new project. “But all signs point to a more knowledgeable and con- nected DPS community and a reduction in the number of calls our dispatchers receive regarding missing stu- dents and requests for bus information,” he said.
Keeping Data Secure On the topic of data security for this type of technolo-
gy, Ammon noted it’s crucial to have “procedural aspects in place to make sure that you know that information is protected.” Easier said than done as it’s a process that can have an “enormous number of tentacles into it,” he added. An Education Week article found that education was
the fourth-most targeted sector during the first half of 2025, based on data collected by Comparitech. “Schools are tempting targets for hackers because they
have tons of sensitive data and have become more reliant than ever on digital tools,” the article stated. Amy McLaugh- lin, the project director for the Consortium for School Networking’s (CoSn) cybersecurity initiatives, was quoted saying that districts are aware of the security concerns but face challenges of funding and staff to ensure that data and cybersecurity issues are adequately addressed. Brown said she keeps physical security on a tight lock-
down as each tablet has a unique PIN that only she and the individual driver has access to. Bill Westerman, Tyler’s director of integration solu-
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