School bus badge program to end in April

Anne Arundel County Public Schools announced it will end a bus badge pilot program that the district has been conducting in the Crofton cluster since November.

The pilot program provided bus riders at six schools with an identification card containing a chip that students scanned as they got on and off the bus each day. The school system hoped to use the data to improve transportation efficiency, increase safety, determine who’s on and off the bus in case of an emergency, and explore other potential projects involving cards, such as a systemwide ID card or one used for school meal transactions.

The program is scheduled to conclude on April 8 because there were diminishing returns on data and the price tag to expand the program was too high, said Bill Heiser, chief operating officer for the school system.

“Crofton bus riders were optionally participating in the pilot by scanning their bus badges when they enter and exit the bus each morning and afternoon,” he said during his presentation to the board on March 6. “Data from those scans were reported to an internal dashboard which was attempting to show us bus ridership, bus capacity and student rosters for each bus.”

GPS scanners were installed in 34 buses and badges were distributed to 3,700 student throughout six schools: Crofton Elementary, Crofton Meadows Elementary, Crofton Woods Elementary, Nantucket Elementary, Crofton Middle School and Crofton High School.

Heiser said the pilot was also used as a method to analyze historical ridership data on the bus, such as how many students are in the Crofton cluster at a time.

Because badges were not mandated, real-time tracking of students was incomplete and without a forward-facing app, families couldn’t check to see where their students were.

“We didn’t mandate the badges for bus entry,” Heiser said. “It was

optional and that impacted our results. But we were aware of the overwhelming philosophy to ensure that we help our students travel safely to and from school regardless [of ] if they have a card or not.”

One of the main reasons the pilot acquired limited data was the continual decline in students scanning on the bus in the morning and afternoon Heiser said. Initially, data showed over 1,000 students were scanning their badges when the pilot started in November. That number is now down to 200 per day.

“Optional scanning will not produce the quality data on ridership or capacity for transportation or produce accurate student bus rosters in the event of an emergency,” said Heiser.

Additionally, while the price tag for the pilot was just under $50,000, the price to expand to a district as large as Anne Arundel County would be over $1 million, he added.

Heiser thanked families and staff involved with the program, and while the results didn’t lead to an expansion, the information acquired along with the technology now in use will provide options for future endeavors.

“Thanks to all the students and schools who were willing to do this, it was a huge undertaking,” he said. “We were able to create some custom reporting dashboards thanks to our IT department and that was very helpful for us.”

Heiser said it was important to see how the district could potentially modernize the district’s bus transportation system; conducting an experiment with the bus badge program was essential to that investigation.

“In the end, we believe the school system should continue looking into areas where the badges can have a more universal impact such as in food service, libraries and perhaps athletic sporting events,” he said.