“When I think about safety and security, a child perhaps has to walk down to the bus stop without their parents because their parents maybe go to work earlier or a sitter is not able to get there at the right time in the morning, depending on the family dynamic, so the child doesn’t make it to the bus stop and we don’t have any record of the child getting on the bus,” Superintendent Martha Salazar-Zamora said during the April 13 teleconference meeting. “This is a way of recording the child is on the bus and then that the child of course gets off at the right place.”
The new system is proposed to help avoid students being dropped off at the wrong campus, daycare or specified location, Salazar-Zamora said.
Once implemented, each TISD student will have a card with their photo on it that will use RFID technology to communicate with the scanner on the bus, district officials said. Students will scan their card when entering and exiting the bus. Each bus driver will have a tablet alerting them of how many students are on the bus and whether the student boarding the bus is actually supposed to be on the bus.
“Right now there is not a mechanism where a bus driver will know who the student is that’s boarding their bus. If they are a student at a bus stop, we are going to transport them to a school if they’re a school-age student, so that poses a variety of safety issues,” Chief Operating Officer Steven Gutierrez said April 13.
Additionally, drivers would receive an alert if a student is still on the bus to avoid any students being left on the bus at the end of the route, Gutierrez said.
Parents will also be able to track in real time where their students are on the bus route, he said; parents would only have access to their student’s information to ensure student security.
“The primary benefits are safety, efficiency and then there is a convenience factor in there for parents whose students utilize bus service,” Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez said New Caney ISD was one of the first districts to start using the SMART Tag system with neighboring districts also using a similar system.
The system could prove to be particularly advantageous, should there be a bus accident, Gutierrez said.
“Another safety feature is, currently right now if we were to have an accident on the bus, our current system would be to manually physically count each student, confirm who they are, their name and their student ID number...and we would then have to go work with [communications] to manually select these students in our school messenger system to send out a message,” he said. “That process is so cumbersome that by the time parents get notification from the district notifying them that their student was involved in an accident...they would have possibly known about it for hours from their students. ... From a parent perspective, that provides a great deal of relief and instill[s] more trust in the district.”
Gutierrez said students’ contact information would be connected to their unique SMART Tag, which only the district would have access to, similar to its existing system.
However, board members raised concerns about how secure student data would be.
TISD trustees approved the contract to roll out the SMART Tag system with the condition that approval is “subject to review of the data security set of questions that were asked by board members, which the superintendent will share back with the board president,” President Michael Pratt said.
“We don’t believe that there will be any security issues there because, again, that’s data that we currently maintain,” Gutierrez said. “We understand that in this day and age we have to be aware of security threats so [the IT team] will be working with transportation to make sure that that data will be secure from our standpoint.”
Hardware would need to be installed on buses to implement the system—slated to launch in August for the new school year—but Gutierrez said the SMART Tag system could prove to have value for students beyond just those riding buses. About 50% of TISD students use the bus service, he said. However, ridership is more when considering athletic teams and field trips, which is why every student would have a SMART Tag, he said.
The RFID technology could be integrated across campuses to further enhance safety regarding who really belongs on what campus, Gutierrez said, as well as take the place of a student ID card used in the library and nurse’s office.
“The primary driver of this project is bus transportation, but if we are going to have an ID card that has all of this student data on there...then we want to maximize and add as much value to that card and to the system as much as we can,” he said. “There are added benefits that we can tap into at no additional cost. It’s just a matter of creating a system.”
