Texas Independent School Districts (ISDs) have been experiencing constant issues with school bus transportation. Texas’ Houston ISD, the largest in the state, has been unable to operate at capacity due to driver shortages and implementation of new safety features. Dallas ISD, the second largest in Texas, is experiencing similar issues and is seeking alternatives for a better and efficient method.
The shortage of drivers of Texas ISDs is improving through incentives for new drivers, and even employing custodians to train them as substitute drivers. The safety on Texas school buses has progressed too with the introduction of seat belts, installation of WiFi and surveillance systems. Parents are advocating their schools to seek the ability to be able to see their child when traveling to and from school, which does exist through the use of GPS devices
In particular, ReaXium offers the School Bus platform which allows parents to see when and where their child gets on and off their routes. This is critical as thousands of students and hundreds of drivers are on the buses daily. This allows school officials to see when students are anticipated to arrive to and from school, and also a bus roster that enables instructors to begin classroom attendance knowing which students are about to arrive.
The focus of ReaXium School Bus is to improve ridership by the use of an onboard device that students interact with, verifying they are getting on or off the bus. The device’s functionality has options of an RFID scanner for student IDs, and a less expensive but more effective option of using their fingerprint on the integrated biometric scanner. There’s a lot of talk about biometrics, so we’ve created a series on demystifying some of the myths on biometrics.
Through the use of biometrics on prison transport, it allows the administrators of the facility or contracted transport company to achieve a few things. First, it dramatically increases visibility for the administrators to make sure the right passengers who are authorized to board and disembark are doing so at the pre-approved stops. Second, a detailed report is made available to spot any sudden changes or abnormalities during the transport as reported by the driver. In addition, this would require significantly less capital and need for heavy modifications on vehicles; it is no bigger than a tablet and allows a user to be quickly trained to use it. Inmate transport is a specialized vertical available under the ReaXium Secure Passenger Transport program. Contact our team to learn more.
