We've got trials both here and Canada where we track kids as they get on & off school buses( which are being tracked by GPS units in real time, too). All the above noted student shenanigans with swapping cards, etc., will of course happen. Then there's lost cards, at $2-3 a pop, cost of the first issue of cards, card readers, and the fact that this is very hard to set up and keep operational. School boards don't necessarily excel at cost-benefit analysis, and are susceptible to flashy new technology that may solve problems we don't have yet. We can tell you at any point on a bus' route, when a terrorist hijacks the bus, exactly who's still on it, and how to contact their parents. This will be enormously welcome to those few parents who are able to find that their kid missed the bus or got off at the wrong stop and thus isn't one of the kidnapped ones, but it doesn't do much else in that scenario. We can email parents if a kid gets off at the wrong stop, or gives his card to someone who does, or doesn't get on in the morning. Districts are already asking us to include live video feeds from bus cameras into our GPS data feeds.
Someone's going to leapfrog all this and write an app that tracks them by cell phones.
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We've got trials both here and Canada where we track kids as they get on & off school buses( which are being tracked by GPS units in real time, too). All the above noted student shenanigans with swapping cards, etc., will of course happen. Then there's lost cards, at $2-3 a pop, cost of the first issue of cards, card readers, and the fact that this is very hard to set up and keep operational. School boards don't necessarily excel at cost-benefit analysis, and are susceptible to flashy new technology that may solve problems we don't have yet. We can tell you at any point on a bus' route, when a terrorist hijacks the bus, exactly who's still on it, and how to contact their parents. This will be enormously welcome to those few parents who are able to find that their kid missed the bus or got off at the wrong stop and thus isn't one of the kidnapped ones, but it doesn't do much else in that scenario. We can email parents if a kid gets off at the wrong stop, or gives his card to someone who does, or doesn't get on in the morning. Districts are already asking us to include live video feeds from bus cameras into our GPS data feeds. Someone's going to leapfrog all this and write an app that tracks them by cell phones.