Bus Guardian: An Essential COVID-19 Student Transportation Safety Solution Featuring Contact Tracing

CalAmp continues to innovate with Bus Guardian helping students, educators and families manage the challenges of returning to the classroom 

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

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has made contact tracing one of the government’s essential pillars to re-opening the U.S. economy and safely transitioning out of the shelter-in-place orders. 

Bus Guardian is a powerful, flexible and scalable solution designed to help schools deliver instant and actionable reporting of school bus ridership for both drivers and students based on contact tracing, which is particularly important if a student or driver becomes ill. The program also delivers a hygiene verification system to help administrators monitor and report on real-time sanitization efforts. 

Bus Guardian delivers a robust slate of contact tracing software and hardware products ready to support schools and families as students return to the classroom. 

“We recognize that schools 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,” said Bill Westerman, vice president, product management for CalAmp. “We’re investing significant research and development to forge new technology solutions that can help schools manage these evolving challenges and make the fall return to school safer for all students and families.”

CalAmp’s 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 in the U.S. 

The Bus Guardian contact tracing solution is powered by Synovia’s successful Student Ridership and Driver Time and Attendance products. It allows a school administrator to create instant reports around each student’s bus ridership history. 

Bus Guardian produces instant reports showing who rode a bus during the same exact time as other students as well as those who rode the same bus, but at different times. This information is extremely critical in cases where a bus serves both an elementary school and middle school during different time periods of the same day. 

Bus Guardian also tracks, monitors and reports on drivers and quickly establishes which riders came in contact with a potentially ill driver, which is essential for fleets who rely heavily on substitute drivers especially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Bus Guardian program relies on an enhanced trip inspection module currently being used by more than 500 school districts, which includes 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 their entire fleets. 

While schools remain closed during the pandemic, Synovia’s suite of digital solutions remains 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
• Synovia customers averaged seven hours leveraging our software in April despite school closures, totaling approximately 5,400 hours nationwide

Category: Equipment, Featured, General Update, News, Safety, Transit News