The wheels on the bus go round and round, but hopefully the data about the kids inside stays right where it is.
As tech becomes further integrated into our day-to-day lives, it’s no surprise that there’s an increased reliance on software to manage things like school bus timing and safety. But with the integration of private tech solutions into traditionally municipal responsibilities can come questions about how safe the technology is and how companies can work together with state and local IT teams.
Get right. For Ted Thien, VP and general manager of transportation software at Tyler Technologies, following guidelines and regulations is part of the job. So is ensuring that there’s a basic level of competence with the districts that will be operating the company’s bus tracking software, which lets parents know where their children are.
“If it’s…the local school district policy, we do have certain technical requirements,” Thien said. “There are some standard authentication controls and technologies that are included in our software, but the software does run on the school district network or in their cloud.”
Tyler’s Student Transportation Software is offered to districts around the country, and shifting regulations means that the company has to be somewhat aware of how its clients are using the technology. The company’s position is to take a hands-off approach, though they do require users to provide “some certain information about your student” to access their page. The company also only allows two adults per student an account to access the locator as an added line of security.
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“There is some control too around who’s associated,” Thien said, adding, “If there’s a change in custody situation that happens, [there are] ways to manage that as well.”
Working it. For some districts, like Indian Prairie School District 204 in Illinois, the requirements mean integrating existing technologies with a new app like Tyler. Ronald Johnson, Tyler’s district director of support operations, told School Transportation News in September 2024 that his team had to “make sure that our current setup was supportive of the new data coming in.”
Controlling that important technology takes manpower. At Tyler, Thien runs a team of around 200 people, he told IT Brew; the full company is about 7,500 strong. Thien’s team works with more than just bus location—“We also have software to manage the fleet, all the school bus fleet, the maintenance records, the repair records for all the buses.” There is an expanding list of requirements for the job, which means more responsibilities. And that means more opportunity for bad actors to infiltrate systems.
“We control all that security on our side,” Thien said. “The authentication process for access to the data is part of the Tyler application, and doesn’t really involve the school districts’ IT personnel.”