HORTONVILLE, WI (WTAQ-WLUK) – The Hortonville School District wants to improve safety for students who take the bus, and it’s using data to ensure that they are.
As a parent, Carisa Fuss tells FOX 11 there have been times she’s wished she had a GPS tracker on her children. When they’re riding the school bus, for instance.
“I have the bus station phone number in my phone. There have been a couple of times where they haven’t gotten dropped off and I called.”
Harry Steenbock, the transportation director with the Hortonville Area School District tells FOX 11 calls like that from parents happen multiples times a week.
“When that parent calls and says where’s my child, we, right now, can’t answer that. And 15 minutes is a lifetime waiting to find out where your child is.”
He says those calls usually mean a child got on the wrong bus or never got on at all, but he has a unique solution to ease those parents worries.
The school is piloting a GPS tracker in two school buses and keeping track of the students who get on them.
Each student is given a card that they must swipe before they can get on the bus. The school district can then tell where they’re at. Steenbock and other district officials can pull up the information instantly right from their offices.
“When the students get on the bus and off the bus it’ll register on the computer, so we can see ‘yes, the student got on the bus. We can see what bus the student gets on.”
Steenbock says the current process for buses without the tracking system requires every bus to pull over on the side of the road.
“The driver has to get out and go through the bus and see if there’s a strange student or someone sitting there crying or sleeping.”
“It’s not a bad idea to keep track of where the buses are, where your kids are,” said Fuss.
The school will soon add GPS tracking to ten additional buses and 1,000 students. By next year, they hope all school buses in the district and all 4,000 students are being tracked.
The program will cost the school district about 40 thousand dollars a year. Steenbock says they used funds from the school’s budget to pay for it.
