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Committee discusses tablets, driver technology and limits on phones for safety
Summary
Members considered electronic pre-trip inspections, driver-device policies and the extra costs and process changes of tablets and vehicle-mounted hardware; staff said inspections are paper-based now and moving to tablets would require additional hardware and training.
A committee member asked whether drivers perform pre-trip inspections on paper or electronically. Staff (speaker 4) said inspections are currently paper-based and that moving to electronic checks would require tablets and additional hardware for every bus, with consequential cost and process changes: "We have paper. If we had tablets, we could do electronics. But...we're a little bit smaller school district...I didn't wanna get into that cost."
The committee also discussed limiting driver use of personal phones on buses. Staff noted phones cannot be used on the bus for drivers and that a parent-facing app should allow parents to message the transportation office rather than contacting drivers directly. Members raised practical questions about substitute drivers seeing routes and whether childcare providers could be added to message lists; staff said those are possible but would require configuration and testing as part of vendor implementation.
No procurement decision on tablets or driver hardware was made; committee members requested that any tablet request include projected hardware and training costs when staff returns to the full board.
