SUFFOLK, Va. — As coordinator of transportation for Suffolk Public Schools in southeast Virginia, Lonnie Reavis has seen his district’s 200 school buses go through an audio/video evolution.
Starting with portable 8 millimeter equipment, the district has relied upon the watchful eye of the school bus cameras to catch the beginning, middle and end of many incidents on the school bus. But to keep the action clear, Reavis and his department have had to keep up with the maintenance — and upgrade — of these systems.
“The old 8 millimeter cameras were switched from bus to bus,” said Reavis “Because of this, things would constantly rattle loose inside the cameras, including the housing and the slide mechanism that held the camera into the housing itself. The tapes had a short recording time and would wear out quickly — we found ourselves constantly buying tapes.”
From there the district graduated to VHS systems, which were stationary but still had problems with tape quality and user error.
“Sometimes a principal would take a tape out and not put a new one in, and we wouldn’t find out about it until we needed to review an incident that happened on the bus,” recalled Reavis.
Now that the district has upgraded to all-digital systems, these are issues of the past and the maintenance is minimal. Aside from checking the filter on the back of the machine to make sure its not clogged, systems only go through a regular maintenance during each bus’ yearly inspection, and most of the time mechanics can find all the information they need in the equipment’s included literature.
“The general rule of thumb is that school bus customers are more do-it-yourselfers,” said Gino Martin, service manager for Seon Design, Inc. “Information in the manuals provide all they need to know to install and operate the systems.”
The new technology has also increased the number of requests they receive for footage from the cameras. The use of two cameras per bus (the district is currently negotiating the installation of a third camera) has made it easier to see what may have led up to an incident, as well as the aftermath.
“We upload the footage to our secure server and then send the principal a link to view it,” said Reavis.
Reprinted from the March 2008 issue of School Transportation News magazine. All rights reserved.
