Students that ride the school bus go missing often. Unfortunately there is a lack of procedures put in place in order to mitigate these events from happening until the moment it occurs. This leads to parents going on a large scale search that involves the school, police department, relatives, and close friends to find the missing child. Searches can take hours which increases the likelihood the child could be abducted, injured, or worse.
Some school districts are integrating GPS monitoring on their buses. While this does provide visibility to the district when buses are on their routes, it doesn’t account for missing students. A proactive solution would be to have a “active attendance”. That would be able to aggregate the number of students that are on or aren’t on the bus. Such as the ReaXium School Bus.
How can districts make sure every student that gets on a bus gets off at the appropriate place? With a real-time updating roster of riders per bus, administrators could see if students are still riding or even at least have a known last location.
We worked with a Florida school district in Jacksonville equipped with ReaXium device and realized they were undercounting their buses by 30%. Not only that, but one day we found a child had fallen asleep and not gotten off at their stop. This missing child would have been found immediately as soon as the driver realized they had a student remaining onboard. Instead of implementing a school-district wide search, the ReaXium device found the student was still onboard and never got off at their stop.
If your district isn’t taking a proactive approach for misplaced students, consider the ReaXium School Bus solution.
