By GREGORY ZELLER //
A national school bus-safety sovereign has summoned a king’s court of Long Island leaders for the region’s first-ever School Bus Safety Summit.
Virginia-based BusPatrol America, a circa-1995 technology company dedicated to safeguarding home-school-home riders across the land, will convene the proceedings May 11 at the Mansion at Timber Point, straddling the greens of Great River’s Timber Point Golf Course and the Great South Bay.
BusPatrol – which provides an evolving range of motion-detection, bus-camera, route-planning and stop-arm technologies to nationwide school districts – is catching on across Long Island. The company’s busy Hauppauge office manages bus-safety programs for the City of Long Beach and City of Glen Cove school districts, as well as multiple school districts serving the Town of North Hempstead, adding to a New York client list that also incudes schools in Albany, Dutchess, Rensselaer and Rockland counties.
Held in cooperation with the New York Association for Pupil Transportation, a 501(C)6 nonprofit organization (exemptions for business leagues, chambers and boards) dedicated to the development and support of school-transportation professionals, the School Bus Safety Summit will unite government, education and community leaders to discuss student-transportation best practices and new technologies.
Timothy Kennedy: Smile. you’re on camera.
State Sen. Timothy Kennedy (D-Buffalo), who chairs the New York State Senate Committee on Transportation and sponsored a 2019 law authorizing the statewide installation of safety cameras on school bus stop-arms, is scheduled to keynote the summit.
“These dialogues are key to developing policy that not only strengthens student safety, but enhances New York’s roadways,” Kennedy said Wednesday. “We’re always identifying new opportunities to invest in public safety and accessibility.
“I’m eager to see this summit examine the challenges that persist statewide and generate collaborative solutions.”
Transportation-related data will weigh heavily, with two expert panel discussions (participants TBD) slated to explore ways to leverage data into new safety protocols. Among the numbers expected to be crunched: more than 50,000 illegal passings of stopped New York school buses each year, as counted in New York Association of Pupil Transportation surveys – “and those survey numbers may be low,” according to NYAPT Executive Director David Christopher.
“NYAPT has been in the forefront addressing the illegal passing issue for many years,” Christopher noted. “Passing a stopped school bus as children are boarding or disembarking the bus threatens the safety of the children … we ask all partners in safety to work with us to address this issue so our children are safe as they travel to and from school.”
Hard pass: BusPatrol’s next-gen cameras and AI-powered sensors identify drivers who illegally pass stopped school buses.
The perfect “partner in safety” may be BusPatrol, which boasts a nationwide fleet of 10,000 artificial intelligence-enabled school buses (and actually tallies more than 17 million illegal school-bus passings annually across the nation). The Virginia-based innovator works equally to capture those perpetrators in the act and bring the numbers down by fostering a community-wide sense of responsibility.
Advanced AI technology, stop-arm-mounted cameras, cloud connectivity and a secure web platform generate “evidence packages” to support local law enforcement, while BusPatrol’s localized education campaigns – including a bilingual call center and various online tools – attempt to change driver behavior within client communities.
The company will discuss those technologies and services with school officials, law enforcement agencies, school bus operators and other stakeholders at the May 11 summit.
“BusPatrol is doubling down on its commitment to making Long Island a safer place for our students,” BusPatrol America Executive Vice President Steve Randazzo said in a statement. “By fostering a constructive dialogue among a wide range of stakeholders, we can develop a comprehensive approach to address the public safety crisis of illegal school bus passings across the state.”
