The genesis of this article is based on personal experiences, and is in no way indicative of lax in the school transportation experience across the U.S. The school transportation system in U.S is already among the best-of-breed worldwide. This article is more about how new and emerging technologies can further enhance the school transportation system, specifically, when it comes to kids with special needs.

My son is on Autism Spectrum Disorder. A classic trait of this condition is that even a small change in the routine, or “the usual” triggers a panic reaction. So this afternoon, when the school bus drove right past our house, while my son looked at me from the window, it triggered a panic reaction in him.

Being on the high functioning side, he was able to hold his emotions till I called the school transportation to get the driver to return him home 😁 My son thought he was being kidnapped 😁 This exact situation had happened with us a couple of times when we were in Massachusetts as well.

Like always, after I soothed him down and gave him lunch, I thought about how technology can help address such issues.

School bus visibility and tracking are generally available in many school districts and they provide an ETA of arrival. Though I am not sure if there is any real-time visibility available to parents. But that is not always needed as long as dispatchers have the visibility into where the bus is at any point of time.

Parents can always call dispatch to find. But this is definitely one opportunity area. No significant hardware enhancements actually need to be made if buses already have a GPS tracker on them. This type of situation can certainly help address issues like the time when back in Massachusetts, the drop-off of our kid was 30 minutes late and we had no idea where he was, neither did the dispatch. I had to do everything to stop my wife from fainting 😂

Situations like the occurrence that happened today, are also very easy to avoid and can be implemented with minimal hardware modifications. It is worth it to install these on buses with special needs kid. When the roads are lined with multiple stops, it is not uncommon for drivers to miss a stop, at least when dropping kids. But in scenarios like mine, where they take a turn specifically to drop my son, in a circular road, but still miss the stop, technology can help them remember why they took the turn 😁

It is also critical from an attention perspective. A person driving a bus full of special needs students, needs to be attentive. I would be worried if after taking a turn, specifically when the turn was to drop only one specific kid, they forget why they took that turn. 😁

Like always, technology can come to our rescue. All we have to do is to leverage the relatively inexpensive gamut of technology tools available today.