High-Tech School Buses to Track Kids
March 18 -- For kids in the Pinellas County of Florida, getting on and off any one of the district's 750 school buses will soon require a pass that even elementary kids won't forget — their finger.
The local school board last week passed over $2 million in funding to outfit its fleet of yellow buses with new high-tech gear — digital fingerprint scanners and global positioning system, or GPS, satellite locators — to track drivers and their young passengers.
The technology, believed the first of its kind to be implemented in the United Sates, has sparked concerns among parents and civil liberty groups who fear the proposed system could threaten student privacy.
But school board officials say the system will help ensure that the kids get on and off the right buses, as well as to monitor drivers' routes for efficiency and safety.
Riders Give Drivers the Finger
Once installed by LaidLaw International, an Illinois-based transportation giant, the high-tech system will act mostly like a digital manifest for each of the county's 750 buses.
Before the start of school this fall, parents who opt in for the program will allow the county to register their child's fingerprint into an electronic database using an electronic scanner.
The device won't capture an exact image of the fingerprint, a school official told wire services. But it will measure enough "points" to create a unique code for each child.
Each student's ID code, which will be protected by multiple layers of passwords, will be loaded into computers on the appropriate bus that serves that child's area of the county.
When they board, children press their finger into a reader and the computer checks each child's fingerprint against its digital list of passengers. If the computer doesn't find a matching code for a child's print, the system alerts the driver that the child most likely doesn't belong on that particular bus route.
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