How Can School Bus Cameras Improve Student Safety?

Big, yellow school buses are hard to miss—but accidents on the road are inevitable. Across a 180-day school year, motorists commit more than 17 million stop-arm violations; that means there are equally as many opportunities for a school bus collision or blind spot-related accident to occur. Though students are 70 times more likely to arrive at school safely by school bus than by car, there were still as many as 1,207 fatalities due to school bus accidents between 2009 and 2018. And that’s without including the events that happen inside a school bus that may also compromise student safety. 

Using an advanced school bus camera system, you can easily monitor events inside and outside the school bus and keep students safe. In this article, we’ll cover how different types of safety cameras—such as dash cams, interior cameras, stop-arm cameras, side cameras, and rear cameras—can help you improve student visibility, save costs, and reduce accidents. 

Different types of cameras for school bus safety

1. Dash cams

Having a full picture of what’s happening inside the cab and outside on the road is critical to improving bus driver safety and minimizing accidents. Dash cam solutions built for large school bus fleets offer both the visibility to monitor events on the road and the scale to support advanced functionality. 

Internet-connected dash cams enable you to capture and upload high-definition video footage to a cloud-based dashboard instantly without needing SD cards or memory capacity. Now, school administrators or law enforcement officials can easily see and retrieve key footage upon request. In addition, advanced dash cams offer optional features such as in-cab alerts that sound in response to risky behavior such as distracted driving, harsh braking, speeding, rolling through stops, and tailgating. Some advanced solutions are even able to automate video capture and dynamically upload footage to a centralized database when an unsafe event occurs.

When bus drivers show signs of risky behavior, you can use in-cab alerts to provide real-time feedback with automated coaching workflows and encourage safe driving. Still, some school bus accidents are unavoidable—and they’re not always the school bus driver’s fault. When this is the case, dash cams can help by providing video evidence to prove fault, exonerating the bus driver and the school district from financial liability. Using dash cams, you can improve operational efficiency and protect drivers and students. 

2. Interior cameras

As dangerous as on-the-road conditions can be, activity inside the school bus can be just as much of a risk to student safety. Interior activities such as medical emergencies, student bullying, and vandalism may happen when the bus driver is occupied and supervision isn’t available. Being able to respond promptly and efficiently can improve the student experience and reduce parent calls.

By deploying interior cameras, you can closely monitor activity inside the school bus. Interior cameras can be installed on high-back seats or the bus ceiling, providing school administration with visibility into urgent events and student misbehavior. With this technology, administrators can accelerate response times by using recorded video footage to develop comprehensive action plans for student emergencies. 

When confronted with parent inquiries about student whereabouts, school districts can now efficiently pull video evidence of student ridership to help locate missing students. Office teams can use footage to observe student interactions to create seating assignments and discourage student bullying. And you can easily retrieve and share relevant video footage with law enforcement to streamline investigations. 

3. Exterior cameras: Stop-arm cameras, side cameras, and rear cameras

The sheer size of a school bus makes it especially susceptible to collisions from nearby vehicles on the road. In addition, blind spots obscure a driver’s vision, putting students at risk when they get on and off the school bus. Using cameras mounted on the exterior of the school bus, you can increase visibility and streamline driver exoneration. There are three commonly used exterior safety cameras: stop-arm cameras, side cameras, and rear cameras. 

Every one of the 50 US states explicitly specifies in its local law that passing a school bus with its red lights flashing and stop-arm extended is illegal, but drivers break this law all the time. To capture video footage of vehicles that recklessly pass school buses on the road, stop-arm cameras are installed directly below the cross-arm of a school bus. 

A survey from the National Association of State Directors of Pupil Transportation (NASDPTS) indicated that more than 95,000 vehicles passed school buses illegally on a single day in 2019. When a motorist passes a school bus, a stop-arm camera records video evidence of the vehicle and its license plate. This footage can be reviewed and reported to the proper authorities within law enforcement to follow up on violations effectively. Using a stop-arm camera, you can improve school bus safety and keep motorists accountable.

Side cameras, installed on the left or right side, and rear cameras, installed on the back, provide a full perimeter view of a school bus. Incidents such as sideswipes account for the majority of accidents and are often not the school bus driver's fault. A full-fledged exterior camera program not only gives school administrators the ability to better monitor sideswipes, but also provides additional visibility into critical safety-related processes such as student ridership. 

Every day, school buses transport 55% of the 25 million K-12 students between school and home. Keeping track of so many students every day, across multiple bus stops, is a massive challenge. Especially for younger students attending elementary school and below, monitoring where they embark and disembark and who picks them up is vital information. Parents want to know where their child is and ensure that they safely get off at the right bus stop. With side and rear cameras, you can capture video footage of students when they get off the school bus, helping to minimize parent calls about their child’s whereabouts and streamline investigation in the case a student goes missing. 

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Why do you need a school bus camera system?

1. Keep students safe, retain bus drivers, and hold motorists accountable

Besides the physical damage that vehicles incur, accidents also greatly impact the people involved. Students onboard the school bus are certainly at risk, but so are the bus driver and the motorists involved. 

Accidents can decommission bus drivers, leading to higher medical costs, lost wages, and unavailable work schedules. Keeping bus drivers on the road is critical, especially given the labor shortage—51% of transportation directors say the school bus driver shortage is either “severe” or “desperate.” By using a school bus camera system, you can minimize accidents and keep your bus drivers safe, ensuring an exceptional driver experience, reliably transporting students, and retaining drivers.

For the motorists involved, you can keep them and the school bus safe by installing a stop-arm camera. With stop-arm cameras equipped, you can discourage motorists from passing school buses and incentivize them to follow the law—lest they collect a hefty fine.Now, you can help get to the bottom of “he said, she said” situations and keep drivers accountable to public safety. 

2. Save money for school districts and municipalities

Though school transportation is largely a publicly-funded service, costs for school buses can quickly add up. Maintaining a school bus is already expensive enough, costing around $34,000 to $38,000 per vehicle. When you consider repairs from accidents and sideswipes, rising insurance premiums, accident claims, and student injury claims, your pupil transportation budget can dry up fast.

Investing in a school bus camera program can save school districts and municipalities money by reducing accidents, improving safety, and reducing legal and financial risk. Video footage can also help exonerate innocent bus drivers from not-at-fault accidents and prove fraudulent injury claims. In fact, camera systems such as dash cams are shown to reduce accident-related costs by as much as 86%.

In addition, some school districts and municipalities may be interested in participating in the Smart School Bus Safety Pilot Program. This program seeks to modernize public school transportation by improving student safety through technology and financial assistance. Currently, 24 districts are enrolled in the program and more are expected to enroll in the coming years. By adopting dash cams—which are one of the specified vendor requirements needed to qualify for the three-year grant—your school district can be eligible for funding to improve student transportation.

3. Satisfy stakeholders involved in school bus safety 

Parent communication is a key element of managing student safety. School administration offices can be overwhelmed by phone calls from concerned parents seeking answers about their child’s whereabouts. When parents demand information about pick-ups and drop-offs, bus delays, or missing students, you’ll need visibility into student location and bus arrival times. 

With a school bus camera system, you can monitor and retrieve video footage that shows you what bus stop a student embarks and disembarks at, and the person who is picking them up. In addition, you can pair your camera system with a GPS tracking solution to generate real-time ETAs that parents can use to track the location of school buses. Now, you can improve efficiency in the administrative office and reduce parent calls.

School boards and superintendents are also deeply invested in student safety. As the decision-maker that allocates transportation budgets and manages expenses, they need to ensure that the technology that school districts are deploying results in a positive return on investment. Safety cameras are not only cost-efficient, the gains from reduced accident payouts and lowered insurance premiums quickly pay for themselves.

For example, with Samsara’s school bus camera solution, Clayton County Public Schools was able to not only improve student safety, but also satisfy other stakeholders involved. “Samsara has been my saving grace because it helped ensure our routes are safe and efficient and that we are fiscally responsible,” said Denise Hall, Director of Transportation. “And because of these new features, we’ve received praise from both the board and the superintendent that the new technology is working and the investment is yielding results.”

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Improve school bus safety with Samsara

Samsara offers a comprehensive platform that empowers school districts to streamline camera system processes, minimize on-the-road accidents, and improve student safety. With functionality that includes auto-uploaded incident footage, automated coaching workflows, advanced telematics, preventative maintenance alerts, and real-time GPS, you can transform your school transportation operations.

Third-party camera solutions often have limited capabilities such as requiring SD cards, capped storage space, and local hosting. Using Samsara’s Camera Connector, you can consolidate video footage from third-party cameras and automatically upload data to the Samsara Dashboard, making it easy to review and retrieve footage across all school bus cameras, on a single pane of glass. Now, you can unify your camera data, reduce school bus-related costs, and take the student experience to the next level. 

Looking for more ways to improve student safety and pupil transportation? Check out our resources about student management and school bus trackers. If you’d like to learn more about the Samsara platform, reach out for a free trial.

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