Clayton County Public Schools (CCPS) is one of the largest school districts in the state, and for years it had been dealing with Wi-Fi outages on the tablets used in the more than 450 school buses in its fleet to keep track of routes. Navigating the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the transportation experience, with unprecedented bus driver shortages causing delays, and spotty broadband connections leaving parents and students in the dark as to when their scheduled bus would actually arrive, according to CCPS Director of Transportation Denise Hall.
That ongoing problem led the school district to seek out more effective alternatives, settling on a fleet-tracking GPS solution from IoT-driven connected operations company Samsara. The partnership commenced in July 2021, with CCPS scrapping its old tablets and limited data service connectivity in favor of new tablets, a 2GB hot spot and the GPS tracking service, Hall said in an interview with Government Technology.
“We were having frequent issues with the tablets that we had (which) were not storing the data appropriately. A staff member would come in and log into the tablet, they would start their route, get down the road and all of the information that they input would disappear,” Hall said, noting that the hardship had gone on for years before they landed on a solution.
Hall said that Samsara's GPS tracking allowed the school district to track its 453 buses as well as record safety data, including if a driver is pressing on the brakes or speeding. Instead of parents logging into the district’s parent portal app to track the bus with inaccurate information, resulting in the district getting inundated with calls on route schedule delays — as bus drivers work in tiers, taking elementary school kids, then middle school and high school, but fill in when needed if another driver is out on a particular day — the new Samsara system has flipped the old system on its head.
“The GPS has given us the ability to provide accurate data where the parents can track their kids in real time in the moment,” Hall said.
The implementation of the Samsara tool, for which the district was honored last month at the Samsara 2022 Connected Operations Awards for “Excellence in Performance, Public Sector,” was “a saving grace,” according to Hall.
Since adding the Samsara tracking system, CCPS has reduced parent calls regarding transportation by 50 percent, the release said. Hall said that the system has provided more than just a bus' distance from a pickup or drop-off location.
“It has given us the ability to help out in various situations where we may have had a driver or students that were in distress and we were able to use a GPS to pinpoint exactly where they were,” she said. “It put us in a position to be able to send the emergency response, like, in a timely manner.”
According to the Samsara website, among the features its GPS tracking provides are real-time data from sensors, dash cameras, 360-degree third-party cameras and other IoT integrations for a safer and more efficient bus system. Remotely, the system can monitor bus conditions as well as stop paddles, the website said, and log bus activity with updates provided on a parent portal app.
