I know that. I’m writing as a cranky old woman who is disturbed by modern surveillance society.
Fwiw, i live around the corner from an elementary school, and they don’t stagger the release. No one except a few kindergartners gets bused. And the third graders and up are allowed to walk home by themselves, although in practice, most of them are picked up by parents whose cars line the neighborhood.
Eh, back to the tap-to-ride, I somehow can’t really get too het up about what is essentially a tech’d-up taking of roll for who is or isn’t on the bus they should (or not) be. Grade school kids in my universe are supposed to be getting periodically accounted for anyway. More intrusive or more persistent “following” would concern me but that’s just an extension of regular concerns about monitoring in public.
I walked to school from K through 7 (and in fact from K-4 I had to walk home for lunch - finally in 5th grade they put a cafeteria in the elementary school, so each student had the choice of going home or eating at the school (in 7th grade, the school was too far away to walk home for lunch (it always had a cafeteria))
I walked to school k-6, and 7-9 when the weather was too bad to bicycle. And when my sister was in kindergarten, she walked home for lunch by herself, because all the other neighborhood kids ate in the cafeteria. (When i was in kindergarten, they didn’t feed us, and we all walked home in a pack. But the kindergartners were dismissed early, at lunch time, even after they started serving lunch at school.
I think that used to be common.
Yeah, at my school, half the kindergarteners attended in the morning and half in the afternoon (and switched in January to the other time). Either way, they’d have lunch at home even when the school had a cafeteria.
My school bus days were from 1971-1977 and we were issued a pass specifically for the route we would normally need. If you needed to go on a different route, you needed to have a buddy vouch for you and you had to show you pass anyway to proved you were a regular bus rider. Some drivers were lax, others really strict about it. I went into a panic in 7th grade (1971) when I lost my cheap little wallet that contained my pass - it simply vanished in the house. Our driver knew me well enough to let me on and insisted I get a replacement.
Odd ending to that story: 15 years later(1986) , I was living in an apartment and was having a friend stay over. I had a convertible couch that my folks gave me when I moved out. I had a tough time opening it for some reason. The reason was my cheap little wallet must have fallen out of my back pocket when I sat on that couch in 1971 and got jammed in the folding mechanism. I stood there staring at it on the floor of apartment. Inside was my pass, an id card I had made in print shop, and 15 cents.
Cool story!
I remember this incident vividly because it was relatively close (200 miles away, but in California that’s close-ish), but I never heard that was the motive. Knuckleheads. I really felt for those poor kids. That bus driver was great.
I never took a bus to school, well, other than to university, because I lived close enough to walk. One particular block was treeless for some reason, and I hated walking that block (the longest one on my route) in hot weather.
Yeah, my elementary school had two kindergarten sessions – morning and afternoon. None of the kindergartners stayed for/came for lunch. I walked home. Had to cross two major streets, too – Washington Blvd and Culver Blvd.
Orwellian. I would be interested in knowing whether the information is available for warrantless searches by law enforcement. No way is it safer–are you barred from riding if it’s not “your bus”? Is a driver expected to remove an unauthorized passenger, even if they happen to recognize the kid and know that the kid normally rides a different bus?
A school’s primary function is to teach. All the extra babysitting is just underfunded strain on already scant resources created by parents who can’t/won’t allocate their own resources to helicoptering their own kids.
I would certainly expect that the answer would be “yes” to both. What seems odd about either of those?
Yesterday we had a “work bee” at the school where my daughter is principal. I had used my vinyl cutter to make up room number signs, black letters on white ABS, and we went around and put those on the outside of the windows of each classroom at eye level. This is probably local fire code.
As we affixed these signs in place we had a little discussion about “the good old days” and how now either firefighters or police would need to quickly identify “room 104” from the outside.
Sounds like an excellent idea, but it also is an unpleasant sign of the times.
During that discussion I told her about how no school I had attended had locked doors during the daytime, nor a special fence for the kindergarten area. It’s so weird imagining all of the security measures in place today.
Not to mention all of the horrific playground equipment we had that would never be allowed today. I remember when my kids were tweens and we used to go play at a local school playground, one day all of the fun stuff was simply taken out. I got a copy of the township’s official list of safety issues, and it showed pictures of dozens of safety hazards, like places where a child’s head could get stuck or places where they could fall and be hurt. They had a point, but it was sad.
Fair enough point, and honestly that was part of the bus driver’s role that I remember. Only, they were allowed to think and use their own discretion in such matters without being beholden to Big Brother. At bottom, my concern is ‘what problem is such a system solving’? There are always insufficient funds in our school systems, maybe if the cost of such a system were redirected to providing some free/affordable & healthy food at school the kiddos would be better able to choose their correct bus? Excessive monitoring of the populace is one thing, but it seems our computer systems are more prone to err on the side of inconvenience and creepyness, and be inapporpriately used by various branches of government, than improving actual safety & security. Probably not too much of value in my comment, just another ‘get off my lawn’ moment.
ETA: I supposed an electronic pass system makes sense if the driver is removed from the equation and an AI is at the wheel. Nothing to fear there.
Speaking as a teacher: The mere existence of an electronic system does not remove the ability, in fact obligation, for the human to exercise their own judgement. In fact, a sensible electronic system has means to put in human overrides built into it.
What we really ought to have is AI drivers, together with human bus monitors. With the system we have right now, the bus driver is putatively the responsible adult present for all of the students on the bus, even though they can’t safely pay more that the bare minimum amount of attention to those students. And there’s a severe shortage of those drivers, in part because driving a school bus is a very specialized skillset.
Well, that would for sure solve the entire bussing problem when they wreck all the students. How about, maybe, a driver and a human chaperone to ensure orderly behavior, and a 1 year ban for troublemakers. Shift the problem kids back onto the parents. Could probs do away with the chaperones after a few years when the kids get trained on how to properly conduct and police themselves. AI is demonstrating itself to be unpredictable and antisocial pretty much on the daily. That’s par for the course in the business world, but it has no place in any part of the education system.
Yes, it would solve the current problem of human drivers wrecking all of the students.
But then there will be a new generation of children who have not yet matured into adults.
On a set route in a suburban area, AI might be a good idea. Speed is low anyway. Hmm, interesting idea.
I would dispute that such security measures or security/surveillance in general is inherently “Orwellian”. In this particular case, as soon as your kid steps onto the bus until the time they step off in the afternoon, the School System is responsible for their (and potentially hundreds of other students" safety. This just seems like a measure to ensure those kids (and only those kids) are where they are supposed to be when they are supposed to be there.
Now if your school is tracking your children and their parent’s movements outside of the school or rewriting the history books to present an alternative reality supporting some political ideology, or sending them to detention in Room 101 to have a rat chew their face off, then that would be Orwellian.
LOL.
Honestly I see this as no different than me having to carry university ID 20 years ago to access various places and services. If they want to keep better track of where the kids are, I’m fine with it.
Amen, sister, amen! Our scan program is only from 5th through 8th grade, and even a lot of them forget or misplace their IDs on a regular basis and can’t scan into the building. If they had to scan to get on and off the buses, half of them would never make it to school.
Seems like a solution looking for a problem, that is hellbent on creating new problems, as noted by others above.
Friend of my son’s from around the corner lived AT the bus stop. In the morning, my son would walk to the bus stop, the bus would arrive, and the kid would come careening out of the house later than everyone to get on. He lived in a house full of chaos.
He would have been denied entry to the school bus over and over again, not because he doesn’t want to go to school, but because his home life was a chaotic mess, and not entirely of his own doing.
Does this requirement solve an actual problem? Are children getting on school buses who aren’t supposed to get on the bus? Is there some rash of children not from your district boarding your district buses? I doubt it.
Seems like a “we have the technology” thing, that is destined to keep troubled kids home rather than solve any emergent issue with busing.