According to the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation Services, nearly 84,000 drivers across the country ignore a school bus stop arm daily. Drivers passing a stopped school bus endanger the lives of children loading and unloading. That’s why on November 1, 2019, Oklahoma House Bill 1926 became effective, allowing law enforcement to use footage from cameras on school buses to track down and ticket drivers who illegally pass stopped buses.
“Installing cameras on our school buses is something we’ve wanted to do for a while,” said Superintendent Brandi Naylor, “but the funds weren’t available before now. This year the American Rescue Plan [COVID-19 funding for public education] made it feasible for us to do it.”
Each bus has five cameras inside and five cameras outside, including two for capturing the license plates of traffic that pass around the stop signal. The set up allows bus drivers to see all the way around the outside of the bus as well as proving a clear view of the interior.
“These cameras are high definition and capture high enough resolution that you can see the smallest details,” said Technology Director Nate Jackson, “yet the file sizes are small enough to enable speedy retrieval.”
Cameras are live viewable to the bus driver via a screen built into the overhead mirror similar to backup mirrors in cars.
“These cameras provide a major safety improvement for kids, and they also make the tough job of driving a bus a little easier,” Jackson continued.
Interior cameras give the driver views of the entire bus, capturing an image clear enough to identify each student riding on the bus, and even showing what’s going on between each of the seats, advantages older bus camera setups didn’t offer. Cameras have already been installed on route and athletic buses, and benefits have already been seen.
“The police have been great about receiving information from us about cars passing the stop arm,” Jackson said, “and we’ve also been able to provide principals with video footage of a couple of tussles that have occurred on the bus.”
The addition of wi-fi, with planned installation in January, to the bus fleet is something that hit Jackson’s radar for a couple of different reasons. First, as mobile connection points for students who need internet during unforeseen circumstances, such as those encountered during the pandemic.
But the premier benefit of having wi-fi on the buses is for student’s use as they’re transported.
The school provides over 100 hotspots for students who don’t have internet access at school. Although the hotspots are small and transportable, they’re intended to be placed somewhere in the home and left there. However, the school had several instances where students were bringing the hotspots to school with them and then forgetting them at school, leaving them on buses, or forgetting them in pockets so the devices went in the laundry, damaging them irreparably.
Wi-fi on the bus allows all students access to the same internet services they have at school.
“The wi-fi is filtered, both with the same filter we use at school and an additional filter,” Jackson assured, “so parents can know their students aren’t getting on websites they should be getting on.”
The wi-fi installations will be paid for with more COVID-19 public school funding from the Emergency Connectivity Fund.