COVID-19 student transportation safety solution

CalAmp, a global technology solutions pioneer transforming the mobile connected economy, and its subsidiary Synovia Solutions, today introduce Bus Guardian, a suite of digital solutions designed to help schools more safely and confidently return students to the classroom.

Bus Guardian is a powerful, flexible, and scalable solution designed to help schools deliver actionable reporting on school bus ridership focused on contact tracing in the event of an ill student. The program also delivers a hygiene verification system to help administrators monitor and report on real-time sanitization efforts.

When paired with the latest features of the award-winning mobile app, Here Comes The Bus, Bus Guardian delivers a robust, off-the-shelf slate of software and hardware products ready to support schools and families as students return to the classroom.

“We recognize schools and families face enormous challenges as they create new plans for students to safely manage the coming school year and that student transportation will play a vital role.  We’re investing significant research and development to forge technology solutions aimed at helping that process,” said Bill Westerman, Vice President, Product Management, CalAmp.

“Our 19 years of experience serving the student transportation industry positions us to move rapidly with trusted solutions to help schools manage this evolving challenge.”

Synovia Solutions currently delivers GPS-powered fleet intelligence systems for approximately 100,000 buses across more than 750 school districts and student transportation contractors in nearly every state.

Trusted by more than 2 million registered users and earning 4.6 stars on the Apple app store, Synovia’s Here Comes The Bus is the essential school bus tracking solution, which serves some of the largest and most dynamic school bus fleets in North America.

The Bus Guardian contract tracing solution is powered by Synovia’s successful Student Ridership product and will allow a school administrator to create instant reports around each student’s bus trips, including every instance a student rode within a set date range and the other students on each trip.

Bus Guardian can generate instant reports showing who rode during the same exact time as a specific student as well as who rode the same bus at a different time, in cases where a bus serves an elementary school and middle school during different time periods of the same day.

“Many of the experts have touted the significance of contact tracing to slow the spread of COVID-19 and our tool is ready today to help schools overcome that complex hurdle,” Westerman said.

“There is a big difference between riding the bus an hour after an ill student got off one day and being on the bus with that same student twice a day all week long and our solution can show that data in real-time.”

The Bus Guardian program relies on an enhanced trip inspection module already used by more than 400 school districts to include hygiene verification in addition to its regular slate of inspections like lights, signals, and other roadworthy indicators.

Schools will be able to track in real-time their bus hygiene activities and generate detailed reports that show sanitation efforts across an entire fleet.

Last month, Here Comes The Bus launched a new feature that allowed schools to better track and alert users of impromptu routes, including food service and homework delivery deemed essential during the COVID-19 school closures.

While schools remain closed due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Synovia’s suite of digital solutions remain essential to bus fleets. Our data shows:

• More than 50,000 app users continued to log on in April despite the school closure
• Nearly 500 school buses across North America logged at least 1,000 miles in April
• School bus mileage is down 90 percent on average across our trackable fleet of nearly 800 school districts and contractors
• Average school bus fleet has cut miles in April from 110,000 to 11,000 between 2019 and 2020
• Our customers averaged seven hours leveraging our software in April despite school closures, totaling approximately 5,400 hours nationwide

“The data shows the essential role Synovia’s fleet intelligence solutions play for our customers as both our transportation-facing products and consumer-facing app continue to be engaged despite the near nationwide school closings,” Westerman said.