The Fox C-6 School District will soon have a better system for keeping track of its buses, and district officials plan to provide a similar service to families.
The district has purchased 75 GPS systems and entered a subscription service with Samsara, a company that provides physical operations technology, for the software to track the buses for a total cost of $45,173.25 for three years, according to Board of Education documents.
“This will be a great help for our Transportation Department,” chief operating officer Tracy Schmidt told board members.
Board members voted 6-0 on Sept. 9 to approve the contract with Samsara, a San Francisco-based company. Board member Judy Smith was absent from the meeting.
Schmidt said the district will pay an initial cost of $548.25 for the 75 GPS units, plus $15,300 annually for three years for the software. He said the district received a $1,275 discount for the first year, which reduced the three-year total from $46,448.25 to $45,173.25.
Transportation Department director Gary Cross said he hopes to have the GPS systems installed on all the district’s school buses by the end of the month, mid-October at the latest. The district typically uses 61 or 62 buses every school day for daily routes, leaving 13 to 14 buses to be used as replacements if other buses break down.
“They will be installed on spares so that if a bus breaks down or is in for maintenance, we will still be able to have GPS function on all buses that are on route that day,” he said.
Schmidt told the board the GPS system will track the location of buses and indicate when they arrive and leave stops. The system will also show bus speeds and bus driver habits, such as how quickly drivers stop buses.
“Several districts in our state and area use this,” he said.
Superintendent Paul Fregeau said another benefit of the system is that it monitors buses’ performances on the road. That information will allow the transportation department to address potential mechanical issues early.
Board member Michael Myers said he believes the GPS tracking system will benefit bus drivers, too.
“I think sometimes as you are out there running your route you may feel like you’re on an island by yourself,” Myers said. “If anything was to happen, we could locate a driver at any time with this service. It is not a spying issue. It’s definitely to help improve our bus routes and keep our bus drivers safe and our students safe. I think it’s a great idea.”
Schmidt said the transportation department and district administrators will be able to access the Samsara system to track buses.
Cross told the board that Samsara will allow his department to inform families about the status of their children’s bus in real time.
“Right now, if a parent says that the bus was 10 minutes early, the only way we can verify that is to wait until the bus comes back, go out, pull the tape, view the tape and see what time it got there,” he said. “With this, I can instantly tell where the bus was at any time and say, ‘Well, the bus hasn’t gotten there yet. It will be there in three minutes,’ or ‘Yes, you’re right. It was running early. Let’s see if we can get another bus back there.’”
Fregeau said in a few months, the district expects to ask the board to approve a contract that will allow students’ families access to the GPS system to track bus locations.
“That is one of the nice features of Samsara; there are a lot of options to look at for apps that integrate well with Samsara,” he said.
Cross told the board the Samsara software has Application Programming Interface (API), which allows different software applications to communicate and interact with each other.
“It should tie into a parent system,” he said of Samsara. “A lot of districts around here have like a ‘Where’s my bus?’ app for parents to see when the bus is going to get to their location. When we went to Infinite Campus, we realized how obsolete and antiquated our old routing system was. We’re looking at upgrading that.”
Cross said if the board approves purchasing a bus tracking app, parents will know when a bus is running early, behind or on time.
“They should always know when (a bus is) going to get to their stop, which I think is a huge benefit to everyone in the district,” he said.
Cross said the district received five GPS systems to test on the district’s buses before asking the board to purchase the system. Schmidt said Transportation Department staff installed the systems on the buses and will install the new systems to save money.
Myers asked if buses driving through parts of the district that do not have strong internet signals caused issues with the tracking system, and Cross said there were no problems.
“If a bus drives through a dead spot, it (the GPS monitor) can take the bus’s current speed when it went into that spot, kind of judge where it’s at throughout the dead spot and then pick it up on the other side,” he said.
Fueling
Also at the Sept. 9 meeting, school board members voted 6-0 to use Gresham Petroleum to supply the Fox district with diesel and unleaded fuel this school year for buses and maintenance vehicles.
Fox will buy gas and diesel fuel for about 2 cents less than the listed price that day. If the cost of unleaded gas were $2 per gallon and diesel cost $2.05 per gallon the day Fox purchased gas, the district would be charged about $1.98 per gallon for the unleaded gas and about $2.03 per gallon for the diesel fuel, Cross told the board.
Gresham offered the best daily price adjustment of the five companies that submitted bids, board documents show.
Cross said Fox used about 93,000 gallons of diesel fuel and about 65,000 gallons of unleaded gas last year.