Technology ushers in a new era of student transportation

School bus fleets have a deceptively simple mission: To safely transport students to and from their homes, games, field trips, and other events. Achieving that mission is anything but simple, regardless of the size of the school or its vehicle fleet.

The sheer number of variables a school transportation director must manage is overwhelming. Buses have to be well-maintained and fueled up before hitting the road; drivers must be thoroughly trained and regularly monitored for performance; systems need to be in place to quickly locate buses and the kids on them; and drivers, students, parents, and school administrators need objective tools to help investigate alleged behavioral or safety incidents that take place on board a vehicle.

Unfortunately, the tools most schools have in place today make achieving all those objectives more challenging, time-consuming, and expensive. For example, most schools lack real-time visibility about the location of buses, often relying on GPS or cell phone and radio calls to drivers. “Right now, most people don’t have any real-time visibility,” said Amber Stanton, senior account executive and team lead focused on the public sector for Samsara, the connected operations technology trusted by organizations across public and private fleets.

Transportation directors and their staff must also manage a mixture of standalone systems to track buses and ensure student safety. Besides GPS, it is common for schools to have both routing software and cameras to monitor, document, and investigate possible safety incidents. “There’s a chance that some of those systems interact with each other, but it’s not typically a perfect fit,” Stanton said. “There is usually friction.”

A lack of visibility and simplicity

That lack of visibility and the need to juggle multiple systems often translates into confusion, frustration, and wasted time and resources. A big reason why: When parents and others can’t confidently pinpoint the location of a bus using an app, they will call the school. “There’s congestion on the phone line because nobody can see where the bus is and they will call to ask,” Stanton said. “It takes time for the transportation to locate the bus and pass that information along – time they could use to do something more valuable, since they have so many other responsibilities.”

Thoroughly investigating behavioral or safety incidents that take place on a bus is also time-consuming and cumbersome, even if buses are outfitted with cameras. If a student is accused of vaping or bullying, for example, staff must physically pull a DVR (digital video recorder) from a bus, upload footage, and analyze hours of video.

It doesn’t have to be this way. By adopting Samsara’s telematics and camera solutions, school districts gain a single, connected view of their buses, drivers, and students. The platform links core safety and efficiency systems that schools already use. The result is faster response when incidents occur, less time spent tracking down buses, and a better experience for students, parents, and transportation staff alike.

Lessons from the road

With 182,000 students, Gwinnett County Public Schools (GCPS) in Georgia is one of the 10 largest districts in the country. GCPS utilized siloed GPS and camera systems but found that parent complaints and incident investigations took days, sometimes weeks, to resolve.

GCPS implemented Samsara GPS and AI dash cams across its 2,000 buses. The impact has been dramatic. Investigation times have been sliced in half, from as many as two weeks to just 24 to 48 hours.

Implementing Samsara also helps address one of the biggest challenges facing transportation directors. “No one can keep drivers right now,” Stanton said. “It’s the number one problem for almost every transportation director I work with.”

Canyons School District in Utah demonstrates how Samsara can help. With 190 buses serving 30 schools, Canyons had long relied on legacy GPS and camera systems that were unreliable in Utah’s extreme weather. Bus delays, slow video retrieval, and lagging GPS data created frustration for parents, administrators, and drivers.

Switching to Samsara gave Canyons real-time visibility across its operations and enabled a new approach to safety culture. Dual-facing AI Dash Cams allowed administrators to proactively coach drivers and reduced driver mobile phone usage. Importantly, Samsara enabled Canyons to motivate drivers through recognition and friendly competition, not just discipline. By gamifying safe driving and celebrating strong performance, Canyons improved engagement and retention during a challenging labor market.

The shift paid off. They improved safety outcomes and driver satisfaction and retention. Which in turn provides relief to the transportation director who oversees drivers and the entire fleet – and who often must drive a route themselves because of staffing shortages. “That person wears 20 different hats. They’re the main point of contact for parents, for students, for drivers, for leadership,” Stanton said. “In the end, transportation directors are looking for relief and more time.”