Banned in many states, and afaik, only used in a few public schools in Texas. Your cite is an ad for their product.
There’s several vendors on the market, it seems to mostly be in private schools.
Picking apart the accuracy of a 2-3 year old memory of the information that was available in real time that morning using the reporting of the outcome several days later is likely to provide a long list of discrepancies. If that’s your hobby, enjoy your day.
My point is that the system would be used to refuse kids entry onto the bus if they were not assigned to the route. So the walkers who were running late (or just tired that day) and went to the bus stop would wind up late for school; that serves nobody.
And this brings me to what I think is the real reason for these systems. Increasingly the bus operations are being privatized. The lessors want to prove that they are ending up carrying more kids to more places than described in the Statement of Work.
While it can be argued that the swiping of IDs might work int he favor of a missing child, profit motive is a far more likely incentive, and given the current state of the US government, any form of tracking is a danger to quite a few children. So I am ag’in it.
I understand your position, and this is no reflection on you; but it seems evident that the article you posted was very badly written and could be interpreted in many ways, including the possibility that neither of the incidents was suspicious. If there was a shortage of ‘official’, ‘marked’ buses and or bus drivers, then the fact that one or both buses were not marked should not be surprising, especially since the second unmarked bus was confirmed to be the correct one. I’ve been involved with hiring railway replacement bus services, and very often, several companies are involved, each with different ways of ‘marking’ their official status.
If there really was an incident where an unauthorised bus took kids to school, that would be a troubling incident (if a little puzzling); even worse would be an incident where an unauthorised bus took kids away and disappeared with them. Neither of those things happened here.
It could easily be an example of bad organisation and ad-hoc arrangements; something that is reasonably common in all walks of life.
As I understood it at the time, nobody was supposing that the driver intended to take the kids to school. The fear was that this would be an easy way to kidnap children. And I do recall that the kids involved were awake enough to recognize it was not their bus and decline to board.
So no kids were kidnapped, but a lot of parents got a hard wake-up call about just how easily it could have happened.
Having said that, the idea of a whole bus-full of kids being kidnapped is not without precedent.
That is absolutely the most stupid criminal motive I’ve ever heard.
Small parts of it ended up in the plot of Accountant 2.
Back to topic. Many schools already have electronic meal cards for breakfast and lunch programs, library and computer access. Bus access would or is a trivial extension. Granddaughter’s card in Virginia also acted like a debit card for school meals (she was not in a meal program but could buy lunch if it was one of her favorites), and functions.
I think the simplest explanation is just that the regular bus driver was out sick, and so there was a substitute. That would explain people not recognizing the driver, and also the timing being different than usual.
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned yet - it can be used to make sure all students get off the bus at the end of the day. Occasionally there are news stories around here about a kid falling asleep while on the bus and the driver doesn’t realize. The kid wakes up back at the bus barn and is obviously upset.
If kids also tap when they get off. And I suspect that a driver who doesn’t do a post-run seat check probably isn’t going to be very strict about making kids tap out, either.
I know two “kid got on the wrong bus” stories:
accidental
A kindergarten boy was delivered to my mother’s front door. The bus driver asked him where he lived, and he only knew the street address, not the town. He also knew his last name (and probably his parents’named) but they had an unlisted phone number, being the rare Black family in a White neighborhood. My mother called the telephone operator (remember them?) and explained the situation. She wasn’t allowed to give my mother the number, of course, but she was able to call it and confirm that the people who answered the phone were missing a small boy and would like to speak to my mother. He was returned home shortly thereafter, not much worse for the experience.
on purpose
My kids were heading to high school, but their bus either came very early or didn’t stop at their stop. So they walked to the nearby middle school bus stop, and caught that bus. Then they walked the quarter mile to the high school from the middle school.
Somehow, the director of bussing learned about this, and freaked out. She called me to tell me about it, and about how my kids risked the terrifying walk between the schools on their own. (They were 17 and 15. And if they’d just walked from the bus stop, they would have walked past the middle school.) I tried to be a good team player and didn’t tell her she was an idiot and i was pleased my kids had made it to school on time, despite their bus being messed up.
The first would have left the little boy stranded at an empty school, instead of at a random house. Maybe better? Or heck, if that bus driver hasn’t let him on, maybe the other bus would still have been there and he’d just have gone home.
The second would have been a worse outcome with IDs.
I’m not a fan of everyone needing ID for everything, nor of surveillance cameras everywhere. But i suppose I’m not going to turn back the tide.
It seems to me that, if you’re going to require IDs, you should allow for situations both where it tells you you’re on the wrong bus, and where it allows the bus driver (or other chaperone) to override. So if it’s something as simple as “kid rides the wrong bus because they’re going home with another kid” or “kid missed a bus and used a different one” then it’s not a big deal. Everyone is accounted for.
The issue with people choosing to walk to get to a bus instead of walking the whole way wouldn’t really be covered, but then, that shouldn’t matter. The only way that’s a problem is if the bus literally can’t fit that many students. You’re still driving the same routes, costing the same amount of money.
Furthermore, while it would be slower, you could let kids still check in if they lost their badge. They tell the driver their name, they check on some tech device and see it’s the same person. Slightly slower, but you get the job done and get them a new ID. Throw in policies to provisionally take any student from home, since you don’t want any kid left at home because they can’t get to school.
The issues described seem to have more to do with them mandating how the system is run than it would with the IDs themselves.
The term Orwellian is overused, but I do feel the negative vibes to some extent. I don’t like the idea of being tracked, really. But if it really is just on school property, where I expect adults to be watching my kids? I think it’s okay if they have some technological help.
Just no selling this data, or even letting any external entity have any of it unencrypted. Heck, don’t let it get outside the school district.
I think that is part of the idea??
Yeah, from the school bus to school, and back again.
What makes you think the school would be empty? Teachers don’t go home until some time after the students leave, and in particular there are usually some teachers on bus duty. And someone at the school would have known the kid’s phone number and address.
Because I found myself left in an empty school a couple of times when i was a little kid.
aww, that’s so sad. I walked to/fro Elementary school - 1.2 miles (but not uphill 
).
Wow, that would take an impressive set of multiple failures by school personnel for that to be possible. Especially for it to happen multiple times.
I tended to wander off as a kid.
It was probably the same set of “failures” each time. Or maybe fewer fail-safes than you expect. I don’t remember it being a big deal, honestly. Eventually, my mom showed up and took me home.
I missed the bus in first grade so a nun drove me home. But that was a long long time ago.
What happened to you 4 decades or more in the past is hardly a fresh anecdote for today’s dismissal from school processes. Think about it. IME elementary schools dismiss in packs and stagger the release, bussers, pick ups and walkers where kids are chaperoned to the bus line car line or the crosswalks to the neighborhood.
Teachers and staff today would probably not be allowed to drive students home. Also teachers, admins and janitors are usually in the building long after the final bell,