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Putting your children on the bus
in the morning can be a slightly
nerve-wracking experience for
parents, but the Manatee County School
District is implementing a system that
gives parents greater peace of mind.
The District has been rolling out a fourphase
plan for new school bus tracking,
routing, and planning technology over the
past several years. The School District’s
Assistant Director of Transportation Won
Oh has been spearheading the process,
which should be fully implemented by the
next school year.
The roll-out began with the installation of
a new GPS tracking system on all District
school buses so that the transportation
department would know each bus’s
location at all times. This technology
also allowed parents to begin using the
WheresTheBus app to track the location
of their child’s bus.
The app enables parents to know when
their child’s bus has arrived at their
school and when the bus is approaching
their child’s bus stop. The app is free to
SDMC families whose children ride the
bus. The app is available on any device
with Internet access (smartphone, tablet,
personal computer).
In the second phase of the new
technology installation, the School
District’s Transportation department
began using a new routing software for
developing the bus routes. During the
third phase, the buses were equipped
with “MDTs” (mobile data terminals) –
which are tablets for setting and following
their routes rather than the paper system
that had previously been used. The ��nal
phase currently being piloted is the
implementation of student ID scanning on
the buses to record the individual location
of each student.
The ID card scanner began this piloting
process at three local schools – Williams
Elementary School, King Middle School,
and Palmetto High School – in October
2019 with a goal to roll out to all schools
over the next year. As students board and