The Kent School District will equip 125 of its school buses with GPS tracking, thanks to a $50,000 grant.
Kent is one of 11 school districts nationwide to receive the grant from the National Association for Pupil Transportation and Zonar Systems, a Seattle-area based transportation technology company.
“We are thrilled to provide this year’s grant winner with technology solutions to help increase safety of their vehicles and real-time information about the transportation of their students to and from school,” H. Kevin Mest, Zonar’s senior vice president of business development, said in a media release.
Justin Dennison, Kent School District’s director of transportation, said the technology will help the district increase efficiency in its bus routes.
“It will let us track the buses, their locations, their times so that we can work on efficiency in our routing,” he said. “It will also have time stamps for when we get to stops, so it will also help us with our time.”
The district already has the equipment installed on 10 buses. Those buses, which primarily serve students at Kent Valley Early Learning Center, also have been testing ID scanners.
“When students get on the bus they scan their ID,” Dennison said. “It gives us an attendance report of who was riding the bus each day.”
Dennison said the ID scanners have worked well, but the district isn’t ready to expand it to the rest of its 146-bus fleet.
“We are still trying to work the bugs out,” he said.
But, Dennison said the grant will help the district get closer to its goal of supplying all its buses with GPS tracking.
“It (the grant) is kind of win-win,” he said. “(Installing GPS tracking on all buses) is something we were talking about doing anyway. When they came up with the grant it is going to save us at least the initial cost of purchasing the hardware. We just took advantage of it.”
The hardware for each bus cost $400, which will be covered by the grant. The district will pay about $125 per bus for the installation and a $23-per-bus monthly subscription fee for the GPS service.
Dennison said he expects installation of the equipment to begin after the first of the year and be completed in the spring.
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