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.