By Jean Souliere
Drivers illegally pass stopped school buses more than 17 million times a year in the US. BusPatrol aims to reduce this number to zero with its no-cost school bus safety programs. Jean Souliere, CEO of BusPatrol, explains how school districts can overcome financial barriers that prohibit them from adopting the latest school bus safety technology, and how school officials can proactively improve student safety across their entire fleets with no capital outlay.
A model to encourage adoption & accessibility
When we first embarked on our mission to make school buses safer for students everywhere, we knew we had to create a program that was accessible to all and offered at zero cost. Due to limited budgets and underfunding, many school districts cannot afford to provide children in the jurisdictions they oversee with the best possible safety technology across entire fleets. School transportation departments are often forced to choose between efficiency and safety when evaluating new tools to help them manage their fleets.
We asked ourselves, how can we make the biggest impact in communities with the advanced technology we were developing when not all buses could be equipped? How could we ensure that all children in America have access to the same safety benefits?
At BusPatrol, we believe that all students have the right to optimum safety – whatever the cost. We decided to flip the problem on its head and solve the efficiency versus safety puzzle by creating a unique business model.
Through our violator-funded business model, even before a single ticket is issued, we are able to equip entire school bus fleets with advanced safety technology at zero cost to municipalities, school districts, and taxpayers. This means that the drivers that blow past your school bus and put your students’ lives at risk are the ones that pay for the technology that protects them. This revenue is also put towards education and PSA campaigns, to further improve road safety in communities.
What are the benefits of equipping school buses with automated stop-arm enforcement technology?
By wiring a bus to build evidence packages, you have also cloud-enabled your school bus. This means it can act as a data collection engine that can power important applications to automate other aspects of student transportation. The cloud connectivity infrastructure allows for all kinds of integrations and data sharing that school officials can use to modernize the way they manage their fleet.
At our company, we partner with industry leaders such as Samsung, AT&T, FirstNet, Zonar, BusPlanner, and Transfinder to offer school districts access to the latest safety technology at zero cost. This includes parent apps, turn-by-turn navigation, cloud-connected safety cameras, remote video retrieval and livestreaming, push-to-talk technology, route planning and smart fleet management tools.
Why should the vehicle that delivers your pizza have better technology than the vehicle that transports 50 children to school? Children are the most precious cargo, and they deserve the most advanced safety technology out there.
Full-Fleet Coverage – access to analytics to make data-driven decisions
More than just modernizing school buses, we want to empower student transportation officials to act proactively not reactively; to make informed decisions that protect students before they’ve even stepped foot on the bus.”
Once implemented, our programs give student transportation departments access to valuable insights and analytics that can be used to make data-driven decisions. Schools that implement additional technology can use the data from stop-arm violations, route planning and route execution solutions to make more informed decisions and improve safety for their students.
Due to substitution of school buses, to ensure the data you capture is complete and accurate, you need to equip every single bus in your school district’s fleet. Not just the 20 percent of buses that witness the most violations, but every single bus. This also ensures that every student is protected.
Jean Souliere is CEO and founder of BusPatrol. To learn more about how you can modernize your entire fleet with BusPatrol to improve school bus safety in your school district go to https://www.buspatrol.com/