Transforming Student Ridership

September 15, 2025

Students loading bus — Stock photo of students loading a school bus.

Hundreds of thousands of students are on new routes to and from school this month.
While some school districts may still be tracking these numbers manually, many
transportation departments are implementing new technology to take the guesswork out of student ridership.

Luisa Brown is wearing two hats at Zillah School District in Washington, that of an accounts payable supervisor and transportation manager. When she started in the latter role in March 2020, and without a long background in student transportation, she leaned heavily on technology for all the assistance she could get.

Brown said that despite working at a smaller school district that transports approximately 662 students daily, she realized that tracking routing via spreadsheets was not an ideal solution. That’s when she first started using the Tyler Technologies routing software, implemented in December 2020. The student ridership verification
technology via RFID student cards was added in 2023.

A phased approach to implementing new technology was necessary from a budgetary standpoint, she noted, which also was essential for ensuring the technology is utilized correctly and benefitting the student transportation staff.

Tim Ammon, a consultant in the student transportation industry since 2001, said the “Holy Grail” of this kind of technology is the amount of intervention required.
Ammon explained that in his experience as a consultant and working in the business management of school bus technology (he recently served as VP and GM of passenger services for Zonar Systems and remains a strategic advisor), he sees two main uses of student ridership verification.

“The first is, in the event that something goes wrong, we can track back to where the kid got on and off the bus and at least have a starting point. So, emergency district management applications.”

In Brown’s case, integration was smooth, since she said she was already using Tyler’s routing software and Tyler Drive to connect with the RFID cards. But in Colorado, Denver Public Schools (DPS) ran into challenges as transportation prepared to roll out student ridership technology last month for the first time.

“Samsara has been a very willing and helpful partner in making sure all the components of our project roll-out smoothly and are operational internally,” said Tyler Maybee, director of operations for Denver’s transportation services, who said the district is creating an in-house student ridership technology solution with the GPS provider alongside a smaller technology company.

“We have another vendor that is more of a barrier than opportunistic and has prevented our innovation from raising the bar within their own technology. It has forced us to find many workarounds and begin to search for a better partner that has a similar vision to fully integrate transportation technology.”

With about 5,000 to 7,000 students being transported daily across Denver, Maybee said time will tell the success of the new project.

“But all signs point to a more knowledgeable and connected DPS community and a reduction in the number of calls our dispatchers receive regarding missing students and requests for bus information,” he said.

Keeping Data Secure
On the topic of data security for this type of technology, Ammon noted it’s crucial to have “procedural aspects in place to make sure that you know that information is
protected.” Easier said than done as it’s a process that can have an “enormous number of tentacles into it,” he added.

An Education Week article found that education was the fourth-most targeted sector during the first half of 2025, based on data collected by Comparitech.

“Schools are tempting targets for hackers because they have tons of sensitive data and have become more reliant than ever on digital tools,” the article stated. Amy McLaughlin, the project director for the Consortium for School Networking’s (CoSn) cybersecurity initiatives, was quoted saying that districts are aware of the security concerns but face challenges of funding and staff to ensure that data and cybersecurity issues are adequately addressed.

Brown said she keeps physical security on a tight lockdown as each tablet has a unique PIN that only she and the individual driver has access to.

Bill Westerman, Tyler’s director of integration solutions, confirmed that all Tyler Drive tablets are encrypted and that districts can choose how registration information is shown when student data is being inputted.

Maybee said the Denver IT team has a series of regulations in place to prevent student data from falling into the wrong hands and that vendors are required to sign a data privacy agreement “to make sure their systems meet the same level of security our network has to maintain adequate protections,” he continued. “We limited the amount of personal identifiable information on the ID virtual and physical ID cards to make sure even if a card was misplaced and then subsequently found that a student’s information is not at risk. This also includes encrypting the QR code so that a scan must be tied to our system to make any sense out of the resulting scan data.”

Edulog’s Lam-Nyugen Bull, who serves as the company’s chief experience officer, said the software company maintains SOC 2, Type 2 compliance and that “all data is encrypted at rest and in transit and we regularly undergo third-party penetration testing and evaluation of our overall security posture.”

As a certified risk manager, Ammon encouraged student transportation professionals to find resources or individuals that can assist with being able to “talk to your vendor intelligently about their data security procedures.”

Especially when integrating different vendors’ technology options into one transportation operation, he said that collaboration is crucial with increased risk of
malicious cybersecurity attacks.

“From a vendor perspective, it’s very likely that each district will have its own flavor of how it wants to deal with this, and so like as a vendor, I should know that,
right? Because I should be responding to what your requirements are as a customer, right? To assume that all 16,000 school districts in the country want exactly the same response in the event of it is, I think, a fallacy,” Ammon said. “There should be some collaboration between the district and the vendor in terms of, here’s our expectations around this, here’s the universe of what’s possible. How do we want to narrow that universe so that it fits whatever we’re doing?”

Evolving Technology
RFID cards, QR codes, barcodes and manual checklists are all ways that student ridership can be documented. Most industry experts agree that RFID cards can help keep tabs on the students on the bus without exposing their information, but what are the future possibilities when it comes to this technology?

Ammon noted that video camera facial recognition or biometric scans are trickier territory to navigate as those types of technology naturally raise a high level of privacy concerns with parents.

“There is no technology impediment today that would stop us from doing [options like biometric scanning],” said Zach Moren, Transfinder’s manager of sales enablement and engineering. “But schools need to consider a few things when looking at ridership solutions. What is the most cost effective? What is the most reliable to capture as close to 100 percent of riders as possible? And what technology can be easily adopted and utilized by bus drivers, students and the community? Based on those requirements I’m skeptical we will see a major change in technology anytime in the near future because RFID solves each of those challenges so effectively.”

Moren noted that Transfinder is developing a digital wallet card that students could access on their smartphones, “like they would a credit card or concert ticket,” which Moren said could address the issue of RFID cards being lost or damaged.

“As schools continue to prioritize student well-being, the evolution of ridership verification technology is set to move beyond isolated solutions and adopt a more holistic approach, intertwining safety and health measures with the core mission of ensuring every child’s secure passage to and from school,” said Edulog’s Nyugen-Bull
when discussing the future of this technology.

Brown noted that one Tyler software feature she found to be immensely helpful is the ability to run health reports to make sure drivers were aware of health information for the students on their routes, such as food allergies or other relevant factors such as anxiety. She said this information was historically kept in a folder or backpack on the bus, which was not the best way for drivers to quickly access the information and be aware of important student information or emergency contact details.

She also noted that Tyler is doing “an amazing job of making updates throughout the year, so that it’s not just a dead program and [it’s] improving every year,” she continued. “And I think they do an amazing job in getting the in-user’s input because they are creating something that they feel is going to work for everybody.

Because there [are] different circumstances in small districts versus large districts.”
Integration and collaboration continue to be important factor for companies and districts as they work together to keep student data secure and improve on the implementation of this technology to benefit not only the students but student transportation operational workings.

Editor’s Note: As reprinted from the September 2025 issue of School Transportation News.