HILLSBOROUGH COUNTY, Fla. — The Hillsborough County School District is launching a new bus monitoring system to assist talk bus occasions with mother and father amid bus driver shortages.
HCPS is beginning the college 12 months quick about 180 bus drivers. That’s up from final 12 months when drivers have been already working double and triple routes.
“Openly, we’ve struggled, along with every school district in the state of the nation, to be able to hire bus drivers,” Superintendent Addison Davis informed ABC Action News.
The district is hoping to higher talk bus occasions with mother and father via new GPS know-how with an app referred to as Here Comes the Bus.
“It allows us, and the parents to identify when a student gets on the bus and when the student gets off the bus,” Davis defined. “It…creates a geofence to allow parents to identify how far the bus is away, so their students aren’t sitting at a bus stop with particular safety issues.”
Each pupil using the bus will get a card that they’ll scan once they get on and off the bus that can then enable their dad or mum to see the place the bus is on the app.
“Within that process of getting on and off the bus is an internet-enabled device that speaks to a server in the cloud somewhere, and it says that this ID number just checked in on the bus and then the bus has a GPS tracker on it, which then a parent can follow,” Tampa tech skilled Greg Ross-Munro defined.
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He owns an organization, Sourcetoad, that makes comparable key playing cards for cruise ships and stated mother and father don’t have to be involved about their youngster being tracked or knowledge privateness.
“It’s very, very, very unlikely that somebody could set up a system to track a child using their card, their bus pass. It’s not impossible, but it would be extremely expensive and there’s much easier ways to track somebody,” he stated.
He added that there’s a larger risk to your youngster’s privateness via others apps on their telephones like video games.
Davis stated they aren’t able to monitoring college students, however their aim is finally security.
“It does allow us to create a safety mechanism and identify ridership, for those who are getting on and off the bus and make sure they get to and from school in the safest manner,” he stated.
For mother and father downloading the app, the Hillsborough code is 75255.
The Pinellas County School District is rolling out the same system this 12 months; the ‘Bus Bulletin’ notification system might be changed with Travel Tracker, a GPS system that can notify mother and father when a bus is working late or another modifications.
Click here to read more on Ross-Munro’s explanation of the app.