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Lee's Summit R-VII plans bus purchases, to test tablets for routing and inspections
Summary
District staff recommended buying eight buses and rolling out tablets on buses to provide GPS routing, digital pre/post-trip inspections and, eventually, optional badge-on/badge-off features pending legal review under Missouri law.
Lee's Summit R-VII staff told the finance committee June 23 they plan to buy eight buses that were already available on dealer lots and to equip buses with tablets to deliver GPS routing and digital inspection forms.
Mister Holder said the district ordered eight buses through a prior procurement process and will receive them in coming weeks; those vehicles are budgeted in FY26. The committee also reviewed a separate recommendation to purchase another eight buses from Midwest Transit at about $179,000 per bus, for delivery and payment in FY27.
The nut graf: District staff framed a two-part approach — replace aging vehicles to spread large past purchases and deploy a tablet system to improve safety, route navigation and maintenance reporting — while flagging legal limits on future passenger tracking.
Officials described multiple benefits of the tablet rollout: drivers will receive turn-by-turn routing rather than paper route sheets; pre-trip and post-trip inspections can be completed digitally and sent automatically to mechanics; and incident or behavior notes can be transmitted to student management staff. "This will allow the driver to have what all of us, most of us have in our cars, which is the GPS system," Holder said.
Committee members asked whether the tablet purchase covers training and installation. Holder said the proposal before the committee included hardware, training and implementation services for the tablet portion of the project.
The discussion also addressed a possible future badge-on/badge-off student accounting feature. Staff noted Missouri law limits digital physical tracking of students and said any move to badge-based ridership verification would require legal review before implementation. "We would have to run that through legal as well. There is a law about in Missouri that you can't track students digitally, physically," a staff member said.
Holder added that the longer-term plan would evaluate whether to deploy additional hardware for student badging; if pursued, that would require a future purchase and legal clearance.
Ending: The committee advanced the recommended purchases for board consideration; delivery timing means buses ordered now will be paid from next-year budgets and the tablets will be implemented districtwide after the pilot and legal review.
