Sandra Hong / Palm Beach Post | January 21 2006

Concerned parents, fret no more. Next school year, there will always be an answer to that nagging question, "Why hasn't little Jimmy's school bus come around the corner yet?"

With a few mouse clicks and the help of satellite technology, St. Lucie School District transportation officials will be able to locate every single school bus on a computerized map, monitoring its every stop, turn and stuck-in-traffic idling moment.

"This is not going to be used as a policing measure," transportation Director Karen Williams said.

It will cost the district about $350,000 of transportation money for the new equipment and software and a minimal yearly maintenance fee, district officials said. That account is separate from school construction money.

Other schools districts in Florida and the rest of the country already are using the technology.

Peace of mind is what's driving many districts to embrace the technology, one manufacturer said. And while extreme situations are rare, just earlier this week a California bus driver was ordered at gunpoint to drive about 200 miles off her route by a hijacker.

Had there been a tracking system, authorities could have immediately picked up the driver's whereabouts. No children were on the bus.

"It's a lot more serious than we think," David Hillman, marketing director of the country's largest school bus manufacturer, IC Corporation, said. In November, the company unveiled the first school bus model to already have the technology loaded on it.

St. Lucie district buses will be outfitted with GPS equipment that transmits all kinds of information to both a remote satellite and the district's transportation headquarters. From there, dispatchers can monitor every single bus on the road, which appear as moving colored dots on a computer screen.

Information on everything from location, speed, how much gas is in the tank to whether or not the bus driver forgot to pick up a child, is updated every 10 seconds.

"It will really improve the ability for us to tell parents where their kids are," said the district's chief financial officer, Tim Bargeron, who will give a report about the tracking system to board members on Tuesday.

The system also will make mapping out new bus routes a lot easier, helping to determine which routes are the quickest and most manageable, said DarlLeen Savela, a routing specialist. Savela spends time every day figuring out how to add more bus stops without making routes too unwieldy for drivers.

"It'll be a great advantage to everybody," she said.

Some drivers, however, might need some convincing.

Archie Hills, 62, a bus driver for about four years, agreed the tracking devices will be great way to calm nervous parents but wondered whether they might be one more thing for him to worry about.

"I've never been a worker who performed the job well with someone always looking over my shoulder," he said.

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