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School tracking plan loses its way

Unforeseen problems have ended a $2.26-million project that would have traced buses and student riders in Pinellas.

By THOMAS C. TOBIN
Published September 30, 2005

It was an idea that was going to put the Pinellas school district on the cutting edge: Outfit school buses with a system that tracks the location of each vehicle and every child on board.

Students would be identified by their thumbprints, scanned by a monitor as they boarded the bus. Bus locations would be tracked by global positioning systems.

It was going to save taxpayers $500,000 a year by shaving time off bus routes and do a better job of tracking drivers' road habits. It also would solve forever the problem of children getting lost on the wrong buses.

Over isolated protests about the potential for invasions of privacy, the School Board approved the system 7-0 in March 2004.

But for all its promise, the system remains a dream. A $2.26-million project to install it on 750 buses was supposed to be completed last fall. When that didn't happen, the goal was this fall. It never got off the ground.

Superintendent Clayton Wilcox has told the School Board his staff is crafting an "exit strategy" from the district's agreement with the main contractor, Laidlaw Education Services of Naperville, Ill.

"The technology as it was envisioned simply doesn't work," Wilcox said in an interview. "It's just been for us a really difficult thing because I think from its inception, while it was well intentioned, it was not well thought out."

One problem no one factored in, he said, was the nature of the precious cargo being thumbprinted. With their hands often dirty or wet, children would smudge the reader that translated their thumbprints into unique codes of letters and numerals. This problem, discovered in tests, too often caused the reader to inaccurately identify children, said Wilcox, who became superintendent after the project was approved.

Another problem: the radio system that was supposed to transmit data from buses to a central computer. It turned out that radio frequencies did not have enough capacity to transmit voice traffic as well as data from the thumbprint equipment and the global positioning device all at once, officials said.

Pinellas was thought at the time to be the first district in the nation to combine biometric and global positioning technology on school buses. Since then, other districts have considered or approved similar systems.

Wilcox said the Pinellas system married several technologies that were not necessarily compatible. Cellular technology would have worked better than radio frequencies to transmit the data from buses, he said.

"All along the way, every person that we talked to said we could do it," Wilcox said.

The problems became apparent late in the process, he said. "We learned a way not to make this thing."

Wilcox praised Laidlaw Education Services for trying hard to correct the problems and said he expected the district and the company to amicably come to terms on who pays for what as they walk away from the project. The project ends with a relatively small portion of the $2.26-million having been spent, he said.

Tiffini Bloniarz, a Laidlaw spokeswoman, declined to comment.

Despite the setback, the district improved its radio system significantly, said Wilcox, who still wants to put a student identification system on Pinellas school buses, though with different technology and perhaps a new set of contractors.

"I think the community demands and expects it," he said. "We gave it our best effort. We're going to regroup and go forward. We'll get there."

[Last modified September 30, 2005, 01:35:17]