Calhoun County Schools bus drivers on students’ first day back from a winter break Wednesday carried an extra piece of technology on board: GPS-tracking tablets.
The devices were affixed to the dashes of 152 active buses and nine of the system transportation department’s service vehicles over the break. Their installation marks the first step toward monitoring every turn the department’s drivers make from computer screens at offices in Jacksonville. Eventually, department staff said Wednesday, the devices will suggest the most efficient routes for those drivers.
For now, the tablets collect and send data every 30 seconds on everything the system’s buses do — when a stop is made, a door opens, and an engine idles.
Transportation director Banyon Allison and the department’s parts clerk, Lee Phillips, have not yet been fully trained on how to make use of the devices and the computer software they feed. The first of those training sessions was to come later this week, they said.
“There’s so many possibilities, but today is day one,” Allison said of the new technology on Wednesday.
For starters, the devices mean school officials will have a precise record of almost every action a driver took in the event a student goes missing or of a wreck or collision with another vehicle — eliminating the “gray area” in such matters, Phillips said.
The school system will pay $331,456 for the GPS units alone over the next five years, Allison and Phillips said. The Indiana-based Synovia Solutions supplied and installed the devices.
The system will pay another $89,565 over three years for a routing software from New York-based Transfinder.
The devices and the software work together, the two school officials said, and allow them to build in capabilities as time goes on.
The next step, Phillips said, is to train drivers on how to log in and out of the devices, which will account for the time they should be paid for. Then he hopes to add the routing software, which analyzes existing bus routes and looks for ways to streamline them.
“We’ve got some routes we could probably take 8 miles off of, no problem,” he said. The routing software ought to be ready to roll out by spring break, Phillips and Allison said.
The two hope to eventually incorporate a computer application that can alert parents when a bus nears a child’s stop — but that could be two years out, the officials said.
Allison noted the “monumental commitment to transportation” the new technology’s cost represents, but said the system ought to recoup what it’s spent in savings from increased efficiency.
He says the adoption of such new technology in student transportation, as with in many other facets of education, is “not going away.”
Andy Micacchione, transportation director of Douglas County School System in Georgia, agrees.
“It’s time that school transportation catches up with technology,” he said by phone Wednesday.
Micacchione’s department has used similar GPS-enabled devices from Synovia for about a year and a half now, he said. His was one of the departments Allison and Phillips reached out to in choosing the technology for Calhoun County.
Micacchione did not have data on how much more efficient the devices might make his drivers — that’s being compiled now, he said — but he believes the savings are there.
An early estimate put the number at $250,000 each year, he said, about 4 percent of the system’s transportation budget according to information available online.
Staff writer Zach Tyler: 256-235-3564. On Twitter @ZTyler_Star.
