Carol’s Summary
The southwest suburban district of Chicago is the second school district in the state to use new tracking technology to locate students boarding and exiting their school bus. The technology serves to ease the parent’s mind and increase safety for the child. The tracking system is used in 5% of the 490,000 buses nationwide and tracks K-12 students.
The system works by using GPS to track the whereabouts of the bus and radio frequency to locate the student. The student has a card that gets scanned when they board the bus and when they exit, so parents can call the transportation director or school secretaries to find the location of their child’s bus and know whether or not they safely arrived at school or if they got off at the right bus stop. Psychologists say a relaxed parent can result in a happier child. Because this is geared to ease the parent’s mind, it’s believed that the next step in this tracking technology will be to allow the parent to track their child themselves without having to contact the school.
Article: A beep, a flash and one less worry for parents
Josh Case climbed aboard the yellow school bus Tuesday, lifting his backpack to scan an ID card that had been assigned to him on his first day of kindergarten.
Read the full article at: www.chicagotribune.com
