Parents Call for Active Monitoring of School Buses for Enhanced Safety and Timeliness

Survey Results Released During School Bus Safety Week Reveal That Nearly Nine in 10 Parents Believe GPS Monitoring of Buses and Their Drivers Is Needed

News provided by

Fleetmatics Group PLC

Oct 24, 2014, 08:00 ET

DUBLIN and BOSTON, Oct. 24, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- Today, approximately 450,000 school buses will transport 25 million K-12 children – more than half (55 percent) of all K-12 students in America^[1]. The results of a new survey^[2] show that parents would like more visibility into their children's safety and security while on board the school bus, as well as more accountability for operators. In fact, survey results suggest that an overwhelming majority want to see far closer, active monitoring of school buses and their drivers. As an issue that hits close to home for so many Americans, the findings come during National School Bus Safety Week, which runs from October 20-24.

To help raise consciousness for school bus safety, the study was commissioned by Fleetmatics Group PLC (NYSE: FLTX), a leading global provider of mobile workforce solutions for service-based businesses of all sizes.

Recent Incidents
A number of recent incidents involving school buses call attention to this issue. In San Francisco, a chronically and significantly late school bus prompted administrators to move pick up times earlier at each stop^[3]. This is far from an isolated incident. The study found that 44% of parents report that their child's school bus is at least sometimes more than 10 minutes late, an important safety issue in and of itself, particularly with wintertime extremes on the way for most of the country and the fact that children could be harmed if out for too long in this weather.

As a far more serious safety-related reminder a school bus driver in Utah is facing DUI charges after her severely erratic driving, which nearly caused multiple high speed accidents with 67 children and adults on board, prompted a 911 call from aboard the bus^[4]. The children were fortunate enough to have an adult with a mobile phone on the bus. The incident occurred on Monday, October 13. Even more recently, on October 19, a Massachusetts school bus driver was charged with his third DUI after he was allegedly intoxicated while operating a bus full of cross country runners^[5]. In both these instances, there were adults aboard to recognize the situation and act.

Far Closer Monitoring Required
According to the Fleetmatics survey, school bus driver safety ranked highest in the areas that need most improvement when parents were provided with a list of areas. The survey results suggest that parents favor direct monitoring via the use of technology. Based on the data, it's clear that many parents agree there is a need for improvement and favor steps to take action to directly monitor school bus driver safety.

Eighty-five percent of the parents surveyed agree that, "Monitoring school buses via GPS tracking would make for greater overall safety and more timely bus service"
- Nearly half (49 percent) believe this strongly

Nearly nine in ten (88 percent) favor, "Monitoring bus drivers for safe driving practices such as speeding or erratic driving"
- Sixty-two percent strongly favor it

Tools Are Needed for Better Visibility
The study suggests that parents favor tools that give them peace of mind about the safety and timeliness of today's school bus drivers.

More than three quarters (77 percent) are interested in the "ability to monitor [their] child's school bus's exact location and status - for example, via a link on [their] school's website" with 42 percent very interested

Parents in the Havre Public Schools district in rural Montana have just that – a "trip-locator" link on the school website. They can monitor the precise location of their children's buses in real time. In the past, parents would call a hotline for information on buses returning from athletic events. But sometimes the driver or coach would forget to update the system, leaving parents frustrated. "That was not a good scenario, because they didn't know when their child was coming home and then they would get upset," says Leila Haigler, Secretary of the Havre Schools Transportation Department. "We used to get tons of calls that the bus was late, or it didn't come or it was early and they left my kid. So we're using the backtracking now. We can tell them exactly what time a bus was there. This has cut our calls down by 85 to 90 percent."

Many would like to see immediate action

Thirty three percent of parents surveyed responded that something needs to be done in their school district to improve school bus timeliness
- Especially true with millennial parents as 57 percent of 18-24 year olds and 58 percent of 25-34 year olds are interested in seeing options to do something about school bus timeliness
Thirty-one percent of parents reported being concerned about where their child was during the regular school day trip, extra-curricular activities and field trips
- Interestingly, this is nearly the same percentage that would like to see something done now
- In the absence of an online tool, a slightly smaller, but significant, 28 percent of parents were so concerned that they actually called the school to find out where their child's school bus was

"Parents' concern about the safety and whereabouts of their children when they ride the school bus is a powerful and important issue – as Havre Public Schools administrators and countless other similar Fleetmatics customers will tell you," said Todd Ewing, director of product marketing for Fleetmatics. "Readily available technology can play an important role in giving them the peace of mind they are seeking. This technology is very easy and inexpensive to implement for schools, often paying for itself in a few weeks."

About Fleetmatics Group PLC
Fleetmatics Group PLC is a leading global provider of mobile workforce solutions for service-based businesses of all sizes delivered as software-as-a-service (SaaS). Our solutions enable businesses to meet the challenges associated with managing local fleets, and improve the productivity of their mobile workforces, by extracting actionable business intelligence from real-time and historical vehicle and driver behavioral data.

Fleetmatics Group's intuitive, cost-effective Web-based solutions provide fleet operators with visibility into vehicle location, fuel usage, speed and mileage, and other insights into their mobile workforce, enabling them to reduce operating and capital costs, as well as increase revenue. An integrated, full-featured mobile workforce management product provides additional efficiencies related to job management by empowering the field worker and speeding the job completion process – quote through payment. As of July 31, 2014, Fleetmatics served over 23,000 customers, with over 500,000 subscribed vehicles worldwide.

To learn more about Fleetmatics, visit www.fleetmatics.com.

Media Contact:
Lauren Wint, Fleetmatics
[email protected]
Office: +1 847-709-5467

Footnotes
^[1]National Council for State Legislatures – July, 2012 (http://www.ncsl.org/documents/transportation/schoolbus_tranrev0810.pdf)
^[2]National online survey among 500 parents with children in grades K-12 fielded between October 16-19, 2014. The margin of error is +/- 4.4 percentage points.
^[3] San Francisco Examiner – September 15, 2014 (http://www.sfexaminer.com/sanfrancisco/chronically-late-school-bus-prompts-sfusd-to-adjust-pickup-times/Content?oid=2898669)
^[4]CBS News – October 14, 2014
http://www.cbsnews.com/videos/utah-school-bus-driver-faces-dui-charges/
^[5]ABC News – October 20, 2014
http://abcnews.go.com/US/school-bus-driver-charged-dui/story?id=26312997