If you've ever waited for the bus with your child in a torrentialdownpour, or in bitter cold weather, then you'll appreciate aninnovation soon to be offered to parents of Orange County, Fla.,students: In the coming months, they'll be able to subscribe to anoptional service that will alert them automatically by cell phone orpager when the bus is a certain distance from their child's bus stop.Hence, no more waiting any longer than they need to.

Thisadd-on service will be available to parents down the road, but it'smade possible by a technological advancement that already exists on thecounty's more than 1,000 school buses: Orange County Public Schools(OCPS) is one of the few large school systems in the country to haveGlobal Positioning System (GPS) devices installed on each and everybus.

"We're one of the only large school districts that havefully implemented an Automatic Vehicle Location system," Arby Creach,director of transportation systems for OCPS, says proudly. "I hadsomeone from another district say to me recently: ‘Oh my gosh, itworks--do you know how many presentations I've been to where they say,we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that--and you're actually doingit!'"

The devices can pinpoint the exact location of each buson a map every 10 seconds. This information is not only invaluable incase of an emergency; it also has enabled OCPS to save about 10 percenton fuel costs, Creach says. That's no small amount, given that thedistrict spent nearly $3 million on fuel last year alone.

It'sresults like these that prompted School Bus Fleet magazine to recognizeOCPS as one of the top 10 school bus fleets in the country recently.

'Instant accountability'

OCPS purchased its GPS units and software from Boston-based companyEveryday Wireless. The units themselves cost about $800 apiece, andthey've been "terrifically reliable," says Creach, an ex-militaryofficial who has drawn from his knowledge of high-tech weapons systemsto help guide the district's transportation services. "Once thehardware was installed, it cost us nothing to operate."

Thehardware consists of a small box installed on the bus and a shortantenna attached to the outside, typically on the hood. It receives GPSinformation from a satellite and retransmits this information to fivecounty locations via UHF radio. The data then are sent over theinternet to a district server and are overlaid onto the district'sexisting bus-routing software--for OCPS, Trapeze Software's MapNetprogram.

The system "has brought instant accountability to our district," Creach says.

For starters, there is the solution's safety factor. If a vehiclebreaks down, or there is a bus-related emergency--a missing child, aserious injury, or even a hijacking--district officials instantly canlocate the bus in question.